More than monsters: Penal imaginaries and the specter of the dangerous sex offender

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic data, this article examines parole personnel's imaginaries of dangerous sex offenders: individuals perceived as especially aberrant, predatory and irredeemable. While the dangerous sex offender is perceived as a monster, this article contends that we also need to attend to the spectral characteristics ascribed to this subject. For parole personnel, the dangerous sex offender is a monster, but this is a monster that haunts; a monster that represents a spectral figure. The spectrality of this figure manifests in two overlapping ways. First, parole personnel perceive the dangerous sex offender – as a person – as a ghostly figure: a mobile, roving, nearly omnipresent individual that is difficult to locate or contain. Second, they perceive the threat posed by this subject – the commission of future sex crimes – as a pervasive absent presence. Even when it is not occurring, recidivism is imagined as an emergent, already unfolding event. In this way, dangerous sex offenders and their presumptive reoffending represent haunting figures that trouble the distinctions between absence/presence, visible/invisible and knowable/unknowable. Through tracing the convergence of monstrosity and spectrality, this article shows how parole personnel's imaginaries undergird the extremely exclusionary ways that they govern dangerous sex offenders.