Could Monkeypox Lead to an Upsurge in Jailing Gay Men? – Crime Report

In the 1930s and 1940s, at least 12 states and the District of Columbia enacted what were known as “sexual psychopath” laws. The social energy for these laws began in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1937.

University of Miami School of Law Professor Tamara Rice Lave said in an article for the law school’s Institutional Repository that the impetus behind the laws were two brutal child sexual assault murders that occurred in Brooklyn between March and September of that year.

The crimes drew both local and national outrage, so much so that the New York Times published 143 articles in 1937 alone dealing with sex crimes.

That 1937 hysteria against “sex fiends” embedded itself so deeply in American culture that the never-married late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opined in a July 1947 article, “

“The most rapidly increasing type of crime is that perpetrated by degenerate sex offenders … Should wild beasts break out of circus cages, a whole city would be mobilized instantly. But depraved human beings, more dangerous than beasts, are permitted to rove America at will.”

Six decades later, Susie Bright wrote a blog in October 2006 for the Huffington Post with the same title Hoover used in his 1947 article.

The HuffPost contributor responded to Hoover’s “degenerate” sex offender observation with this reply:

Grown-ups have been f..king kids and f..king them over, creating them and letting go of them, treating them like property, loving them badly and loving them inadequately—FOREVER. If we wanted to change the face of abandonment and abuse, we’d give more respect and power to young people than we do to fetuses.

Far more often than not, the real degenerate “sex fiends” come from Christian, Jesus-loving, Bible-swearing “decent” families that infect children with sexual degeneration through sexual molestation by fathers, uncles, coaches, priests, pastors, teachers, and scout leaders.

These “grown-up” producers of sexual degeneration were the real “sexual psychopaths” in 1937.

They are the same ones today.

Sexual psychopath laws were premised on the social notion—fed by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover—that the public needed protect its children from “sex fiends” and “sex degenerates.”

These laws defined sexual psychopaths as “persons with criminal propensities to the commission of sex offenses.”

They allowed states to confine sexual psychopaths in state hospitals for the insane without any meaningful due process of law.

These laws, however, ultimately fell into legislative disfavor in the 1950s after national media attention became focused on the horrific conditions in prisons and mental institutions.

A new social notion emerged from the ashes of the sexual psychopath laws that held any aberrant criminal and sexual behaviors could be “treated.”

But that humane treatment approach lasted roughly four decades before a newer, meaner sexual psychopath law reared its ugly head in 1990 when the state of Washington enacted its Community Protection Act (CPA).

The CPA allows state prosecutors or the state’s attorney general to identify a “sexually violent predator” whose prison sentence for a violent sex offense has expired or is about to expire and have them committed indefinitely to “civil commitment” in a mental health facility until a jury determines that the offender is no longer a threat to society.

Washington places its “sexually violent predators” (SVPs) in a facility known as the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island. No SVP offender was released from the facility until recent years when a few were released into what is known as a Lesser Restrictive Alternative (LRA).

The state of Minnesota in 1995 followed Washington’s lead by opening its Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) in a high security facility known as Moose Lake for its SVPs.

The state now confines some SVPs at its St. Peter Regional Treatment Center—a facility originally opened in 1866 as a hospital to treat the insane.

Today, 18 other states, the federal government, and the District of Columbia operate one or more of these restrictive penal, not treatment, facilities for determined SVPs.

That the facilities are penal in nature is evidenced by the fact that, as reported in the Sept. 28, 2021 edition of The Crime Report, between 2012 and 2021, Minnesota had “graduated” (unconditional release) only 14 offenders and put a mere 48 in a strict supervised release program.

Some 88 other SVPs secured their graduation through death inside the facilities. In effect, more offenders were carried out of civil commitment facilities in body bags than those released through “treatment.”

Minnesota currently has roughly 700 SVPs housed in what has become known as their two “Shadow Prisons.” That’s 200 less than those housed in California which has the largest SVP civil commitment program in the nation, as pointed out by The Crime Report.

A 2020 study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found there were a total of 6,300 SVPs housed in American civil commitment facilities across the country.

Author llan H. Meyer, Distinguished Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute and Trevor Hoppe, assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, released two key findings in the study:

• • Black men are vastly overrepresented in the civically committed population—twice more likely to be committed than white men.
  • Two states—Texas and New York—place men who have men as victims of their crimes at a rate 2 to 3 times higher than men with female victims—a trend that cuts across racial and ethnic lines.

Prof. Hoppe stated that the latter finding reveals that “gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men face much higher rates of civil commitment than their heterosexual counterparts.

“This suggests that state authorities [in Texas and New York] deem queer men to be more violent more dangerous or mentally ill, and more deserving of commitment under these laws.”

These two key findings offer some empirical evidence that civil commitment programs are both racist and homophobic.

That brings us to monkeypox.

Recent evidence shows that the global spread of more than 16,000 monkeypox cases was caused by sex between men.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, was quoted in a July 22, 2022 NBC News report as saying:

“These data point clearly to the fact that infections are so far almost exclusively occurring among men who have sex with men.

And the clinical presentation of these infections suggest that sexual transmission, not just close physical contact, may be helping spread the virus among this population.”

America today is experiencing a rise in racism and homophobia that threatens to return this country to its violent social upheavals in the 1950s.

A recent poll showed that roughly half of all Americans believe that there will be a civil war in this country in the next several years.

Monkeypox, and the irrational social media fear that it will reach pandemic proportions, poses a real risk that it will give states—especially those controlled by right-wing Republicans—yet another racist/homophobic “reason” to keep designated SVP black men whose victims were men confined in civil commitment facilities until the body bags come calling—not to mention those who will be added to the current 6,300 SVP population.

In 1937, many Americans with little or no education—and even some with Ivy League degrees believed that Chester the Molester was lurking behind every bush, ready to snatch any child passing by.

In 2022, America could easily be led to believe through social media misinformation that black men (as well as men of other colors) are responsible for both the threat and spread of a monkeypox pandemic.

That “potential” threat would certainly give the ever increasing racist, homophobic segments of our society the impetus to eliminate, or at the very least control, same sex, especially if it is joined by matrimony.

Against that backdrop, those involved in the civil commitment screening process, which is a mirror into the systemic racism of the larger criminal justice system, will certainly feel compelled to add monkeypox to the commitment criteria.

Billy Sinclair spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, six of which were on death row. He is a published author, an award-winning journalist (a George Polk Award recipient), and the co-host of the criminal justice podcast, “Justice Delayed.”

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