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Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders

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Sexually Violent Predators: A Clinical Science Handbook

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Abstract

Civil preventive detention, by its very nature, represents a departure from the normal model of criminal justice. In the case of sex offender civil commitment, the circumstances warranting detention are no more dire than for other serious crimes. Yet, sex offenders are treated as a special class, based upon pseudoscience and cultural panic. State and federal sexually violent predator laws that allow for lifetime civil commitment of sex offenders, premised on myths that allocate substantial resources in a never-ending criminal war, do not create a just or better society.

Portions of this chapter have previously appeared in The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, and Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kansas College of Law, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Corey Rayburn Yung

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  1. Corey Rayburn Yung
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Correspondence to Corey Rayburn Yung .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

    William T. O’Donohue

  2. Special Psychological Services, LLC, Bloomfield, NJ, USA

    Daniel S. Bromberg

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Yung, C.R. (2019). Civil Commitment of Sex Offenders. In: O’Donohue, W.T., Bromberg, D.S. (eds) Sexually Violent Predators: A Clinical Science Handbook. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04696-5_3

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