Award Date

May 2023

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Committee Member

Barbara Brents

Second Committee Member

Elizabeth Lawrence

Third Committee Member

Robert Futrell

Fourth Committee Member

Trevor Hoppe

Fifth Committee Member

David Tanenhaus

Number of Pages

277

Abstract

Over the past thirty-five years, the United States has seen a dramatic expansion of regulatory policy around individuals convicted of sexual offenses. Sex offender management policies include national and state registries, notification laws, treatment mandates, residency restrictions, and numerous exclusions from institutions. A growing body of research from sociologists and criminologists has tracked the effects of this sex offender regime by measuring recidivism and collateral consequences among released offenders. Less attention has been paid to how sex offenders adapt to their regulator context—especially the selective public visibility that the registry generates. Furthermore, sociological scholarship has not yet developed strong theoretical tools with which to make sense of sex offense management. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 106 registered citizens in the state of Nevada, I examine how registered citizens experience their contacts with direct state actors, various types of social relationships, and navigating institutions.I find that registered citizens face ever-present tensions across most social domains that are mitigated by how, when, and what information is released about their criminal history. I argue that a constellation of “information triggers” result in their offense history being revealed at critical junctures that systematically exclude them from a variety of interpersonal relations, group membership, and access to essential institutions like work and community. Direct state actors influence registered citizens by actively triggering the release of information to others in the community or to other sex offenders, isolating them from their communities and each other. In order to form or retain social ties, registered citizens worked to establish counternarratives facilitate disclosure and differentiate themselves from cultural perceptions of sex offenders; however, not all ties were as responsive. Registered citizens struggled to form weak social ties in their community, among their neighbors, and with friends, resulting in a much smaller social network and decreased social capital. Registered citizens faced extensive collateral consequences, including employment rejection, termination, housing rejection, harassment, and an unpredictable legal environment that caused registrants to lose a sense of progress toward normal life. I argue that the components of sex offender experience are best understood through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, a theoretical framework that examines government practice and logics as moving through the state and into the public to generate technologies of the self. The registry depends upon the public to expand the range of enforcement beyond what a democratic state would normally allow, enabling the rejection of the registered from most social domains with minimal action by the state. Approaching sex offense management from this perspective enables scholars to reframe sex offense management as a collaborative process between state actors, legislative processes, and the free actions of the public. Furthermore, it reveals how a contemporary state apparatus can employ the selective disclosure of information as a tool of social control, both for offenders and for the public.

Keywords

Collateral Consequences; Governmentality; Sex Offender; Sex Offender Registry; Social Control

Disciplines

Criminology | Criminology and Criminal Justice | Sociology

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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