Introduction: Sexuality, Criminalization, and Social Control

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE EXAMINES THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF criminalization within and beyond the United States. Over the past three decades, the United States has increasingly relied on criminalization as a strategy for managing social problems. As a result, over 2.3 million people, or one in every 100 adults, are presently incarcerated, excluding those held in immigration detention, juvenile justice, or military facilities (Warren, 2008). Additionally, in the post-September 11 political context, new technologies of surveillance and detention have emerged, resulting in the criminalization and deportation of thousands of immigrants from the United States, and the indefinite detention and abuse of prisoners of war around the globe. Scholars have critically considered race in their studies of criminalization, examining the severe and disproportionate effects on low-income communities and communities of color (Alexander, 2010; Wacquant, 2001; Western, 2007). They have also analyzed the gendered dynamics of incarceration, as men are more likely to be locked up than women are, but the female prison population has grown at a much faster rate (Chesney-Lind, 2002; Kim, 2003; Richie, 2002; 1996). This special issue builds upon this scholarship, by investigating multiple relationships between sexuality, criminalization, and social control. Several articles here focus on the ways in which correctional facilities are deeply implicated in the management of sexuality, as total institutions that fundamentally control and coerce inmates' bodies. This is made apparent through institutional policies that regulate sexual relationships, carceral environments that facilitate sexual abuse, routine practices that scrutinize and sexualize inmates' bodies, and court rulings that refuse claims for healthcare by transgender inmates' on "security" grounds. These articles also highlight how cultural notions of normative sexuality shape contemporary constructions of "the criminal," who threatens social and moral order and hence requires incapacitation. This conjures up the hypersexual, hypermasculine black man, the sexually promiscuous delinquent girl, and the homophobic Muslim migrant. Also in this special issue are explorations of sexuality and policing outside correctional facilities, focusing on anti-prostitution and immigration laws in the United States and hate crime laws in Germany. The first set of essays explores how the criminal justice system manages sexuality within adult and juvenile detention facilities in the United States. We begin with Lisa Pasko's article "Setting the Record 'Straight': Girls, Sexuality, and the Juvenile Correctional System," which examines the ways in which the juvenile justice system regulates girls' same-sex sexual behavior within residential correctional facilities. Based on interviews with 55 juvenile justice professionals in the Western United States, Pasko argues that staff respond to girls' same-sex sexuality in three ways: as a psychiatric pathology that results from a history of sexual abuse; as a temporary phenomena that stems from institutional experience rather than from a valid lesbian, bisexual, or queer identity; and as a criminal offense that violates institutional "no touching" policies and leads to arrest and adjudication. According to Pasko, the criminalization response is a relatively new development that emerged in the context of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Although PREA addresses a clear and pressing problem (sexual violence in prison), observers have criticized its primary focus on violent rape between male prisoners and its relative neglect of staff sexual abuse, the complexities of sexual coercion, and structural violence within the prison environment (Ristroph, 2006; Smith, 2008). Pasko extends this critique by showing that PREA has also effectively criminalized same-sex sexual activity between institutionalized girls, illuminating "the capillary power of the adult male prison system to spread its policies to lower institutions of social control. …