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Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws And the Rise of the Preventive State

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In this insightful book, law professor Eric Janus cogently explains why sexual predator legislation, despite its allure of zero tolerance for sexual violence, makes for very bad public policy.

Predator laws will never work, he argues, because they target only a tiny fraction of sexual violence. An empty "cleansing ritual," they require no fundamental societal change. But they are far from harmless. They siphon vast sums of money away from other programs that could do more good for more people. And they reinforce a distorted notion of sexual assailants as mainly stranger rapists with abnormal psychological makeups.

On a potentially more dangerous level, they provide a template for the resurrection of preventive laws on a massive scale. Janus reminds us of the historical struggles that went into dismantling earlier preventive detention laws that locked up outsiders for what they might (or might not) do. These included slave laws, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and eugenic programs to forcibly sterilize and incapacitate "mental defectives." Sexual predator civil commitment laws are especially dangerous because we can all unite around hating the archetypal sexual bogeyman, and the "science" of risk prediction has a scientific and naturalized veneer that makes preventive detention seem more palatable.

One of Janus' most interesting arguments is that - perhaps accidentally - the sexual predator laws have become a powerful force for the politically conservative agenda of dismantling hard-fought feminist rape reforms. The "tabloid model of gender violence" epitomized in these laws favors biological and psychological explanations over sociocultural ones, and supports the patriarchal rape myth that rapists "lack control" over their sexual impulses.

Janus is no newcomer to this topic. He has written and lectured extensively on sex offender civil commitment and psychology-law topics more generally for the past 17 years or so. His knowledge base allows him to back up his arguments with empirical data. In this meticulously researched book, he also offers solutions, such as a public health harm reduction model and the proposition that sex offender risk can be lowered through carefully designed risk management and containment programs.

Everyone who is interested in the prevention of sex offending, as well as the creation of sound, scientifically based public policy, should read this book.

It might not seem an inviting task to try to stem the mounting popular tide in favor of ever longer detention, by any means possible, of convicted sexual predators, but Eric Janus has managed to do so in a book that is carefully argued and evinces clearly both his wisdom and his compassion for the victims of crime. In addition to discussing the merits of extended detention of known predators and public monitoring of released sex offenders, treating both trends in the context of the question of how best to prevent sexual violence, Failure to Protect also takes up two larger social questions: why we are so focused on the "worst of the worst;" and our apparent willingness to trade civil liberties for safety (or the illusion of safety).

The book is astonishingly well written. It is lucidly organized into chapters and sections; you always know where you are in the argument. The prose is as elegant and clear as the reasoning is strong, free of the jargon that might so easily have marred a book on this subject. The punctuation and footnoting deserve commendation, as they unobtrusively guide the flow and document the argument. Rarely these days does any author get every detail of writing so right. Even the production gives evidence of unhurried care, with next to no misprints.

Eric Janus, with a clear mind and precise hand, sets out to lead the call for reasonableness in an era of too eager politcally and socially to respond to "sexual predators" without consideration of the long term impacts of our political and legal tendencies to punish without logic and demonize without understanding the true causes of sexual violence in our everyday lives. This book raises questions about the future of us all as we rush to "fix" a problem we don't really understand and certainly don't want to talk about among ourselves.

This book is one of the first books I read when doing research for my legal website and book on sex crime laws, and much of my work was influenced by this book. Janus gives a very detailed history of how our current state of sex offender laws evolved and shows the dangers of passing laws based on emotion rather than on facts. It is truly an innovative approach; this book was written back in 2006, yet the message is still too difficult for many to accept, as evidenced by the amount of hate mail I've received for adopting some of the conclusions Janus reaches in his book. This work is heavily referenced in my own book. Once Fallen