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Classing Sex Offenders: How Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys Differentiate Men Accused of Sexual Assault

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Jamie L. Small
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Abstract

As public awareness of and concern about sexual victimization has increased in recent decades, stigmatization of sex offenders has also increased considerably. Contemporary sex offender policies transform discrete criminal behaviors into lifelong social identities. Although there is much debate about the efficacy and constitutionality of such policies, we know little about how the category of “sex offender” is constituted in the first place. In this article, I reveal how prosecutors and defense attorneys construct sex offenders, not as monsterous or racialized as is commonly thought, but as “lower class” men. This analysis is based on 30 in-depth interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in Michigan. These legal actors wield disproportionate power in defining the boundaries of criminal behaviors and individuals. That they associate sexual criminality with lower class men demonstrates yet another way that class-based inequalities are reproduced in the legal field.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 109 - 141
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The National Science Foundation #1122312 provided support for data collection. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Law & Society Association Annual Meeting, June 2012, and the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2012. The author wishes to thank Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Anna R. Kirkland, Rose Corrigan, Salik Farooqi, the editors, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism. This analysis would not be possible without the generous cooperation of the respondents, who spoke candidly and thoughtfully about their work as prosecutors and defense attorneys. Finally, the author wishes to acknowledge the sexual assault survivors whose experiences are narrated second hand in this analysis.

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