CLSC | Socio-Legal Studies Workshop: Amelia Roskin-Frazee - "'Guys Who Live in Their Van Down by the River': Criminalizing the Ideal Sex Offender in the Age of Progressive Prosecution"

Abstract

My project examines how prosecutors and law enforcement officers operationalize carceral imaginaries in California sex crime cases. In particular, it wrestles with the dissonance between prosecutor and law enforcement officers' stated commitments to progressive prosecution and the punitive, racialized outcomes of modern sex crime prosecutions based on their ore-conceived ideas of who constitutes a sex offender.
Using in-depth interviews with over 30 (and counting) state prosecutors, DAs, law enforcement officers, and judges in California, I find that despite seeing themselves as agents of justice with awareness about systemic racism in the criminal legal system, these state officials use terms like “culture” as a proxy for imposing criminality upon sex crime defendants from minority communities — especially Hispanic and low-income defendants. Additionally, state officials' use of sociolegal terms like “systemic racism” and “toxic masculinity” act as a shield — giving the appearance of progressive policing and prosecution practices to the public, while officials continue to act with unconscious biases rooted in white supremacy and classism when making charging, arrest, and case processing decisions.