News & Resources: Fighting Civil Commitment

Imprisoning people indefinitely for crimes they might commit in the future turns any notion of the rule of law on its head. In a remarkable series of newsletters, The Legal Pad, a civilly-committed former attorney looks at the extra-legality and social tragedy of America’s growing gulag system.

The Legal Pad, index to vols 1 to 4

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- The Legal Pad, vol 01, num 01, Dec 2016

New on the site

Poet, playwright, editor, and activist, Perry Brass stands as an important and enduring voice emerging from the American gay liberation movement. The William A. Percy Foundation is pleased to announce author and activist Perry Brass as recipient of its 2025 Charley Shively Prize for Gay Liberation.

So intense is the public hysteria over sexual threats to children that the usual standards of evidence are often pushed aside: innocent men and women are sentenced to decades in prison based on dubious "recovered memories," sensational charges of Satanic cults, children manipulated by a vindictive former spouse in a custody dispute, untrained therapists who bully kids with repeated leading questions, neurotic moms with vivid fantasies about their child's day care, prosecutors who suppress exculpatory evidence, etc. The recently dissolved National Center for Reason and Justice was one of the few entities that fought for exoneration in these cases. Read this history by its Executive Director, along with a catalogue of the cases they championed, linked to descriptions of each one. A Brief History of the National Center for Reason and Justice.

What does it say about a nation’s moral compass when baiting, harassing, and often assaulting unsuspecting people becomes both a form of entertainment and a display of one’s own virtue? Sandy Rozek, communications director of NARSOL, raises this question in this short article on the rise of online predation by Chris Hansen copycats: The New Vigilantism.

Discussions regarding the personal decisions of young people typically try to balance protectionist and libertarian concerns. Yet for the sole issue of gender transitioning, the deeper questions of consent and risk are often chalked off the purview of ultraconservative obstructionists. Read this short editorial for an alternative perspective on whether the current protocols for gender clinics represent the wisest approach.

Recently Dr. Shawn Rolfe presented one of the foundation's forthcoming papers, Bias in Sentencing Men for Sexual Offenses Against Minors, at the National Institute of Justice’s 2024 Research Conference. Read a short summary here.

Congratulations to the winner of our 2024 Warren Johansson Book Award, Bonnie Burkhardt, for her book Manufacturing Criminals, 2nd Edition: Wiretapping and Planting Evidence. Click here to find out more about Burkhardt and her fight in defense of civil liberties.

This November, two heavyweight champions in fear mongering will battle it out for the Oval Office. How do Harris and Trump compare on issues of sexual politics, and who will be the primary casualties in this theomachy? Find out here.

“Hookup culture” has been a talking point in the media for years now, but what actually occurs during these strange college rituals? Bringing together a wealth of data, along with her own observations and original research, sociologist Lisa Wade, in her new book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, breaks it down for us. Click here for a review.

Comprehensive sex education—sex education that provides young people with the information they need to make healthy decisions—has a direct impact on reduced rates of teen pregnancy and STD contraction. Does comprehensive sex education also play a role in protecting young people from sexual violence and abuse? Read this short article for some evidence in the affirmative. Comprehensive Sex Education as Sexual Violence/Abuse Prevention? – Some Findings.

Jill Ciment's most recent book, Consent: A Memoir, is a look back at her almost 50-year marriage with her art teacher who she met when she was 17 and he 47. Can Ciment reconcile her love for her late husband with her belief in the vulnerability of young women in the face of predatory older men? Find out here.

DoD signal analyst Bonnie Burkhardt once again exposes the Fourth Amendment violations of the “Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force” (ICAC) in her second edition of Manufacturing Criminals: Wiretapping and Planting Evidence. Will her findings make her the whistleblower of the 21st century? Only if people are willing to hear what she has to say. Read a review, and personal reflection, here.

Hatred of Sex by co-authors Oliver Davis and Tim Dean is a unique account of the paradoxes of sexual pleasure, and why even those who extoll its rewarding qualities are—in some roundabout way—averse to it. Read a summary of Davis and Dean’s heterodoxical argument here.

The William A. Percy Foundation is pleased to announce August Bernadicou as our 2023 Charley Shively Prize for Gay Liberation recipient. Journalist, historian, archivist, Bernadicou has been interviewing lesser known LGBTQ movement veterans since he was 13 years old, collecting the stories of queer writers, performers, activists, artists, thinkers and leaders, from the homophile movement of the 1950s to the AIDS crisis. Find out more about his work here.

Jean M. Twenge’s latest book Generations is a statistic-stuffed panorama of American society through the exploration of five generations over the course of their lives, from the Silents to Generation Z. Read a review here.

Trevor Hoppe & Shantel Gabrieal Buggs’ Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era offers an illuminating and important (if occasionally uneven) collection of queer perspectives on consent, giving the debate a much-needed breath of fresh air. Read a review here.

Do the erotic desires of a citizen body and a nation’s strategy for resource distribution operate within the same sphere, or are private intimacies unrelated to public policy? This unique glimpse into the demographic challenges faced by Classical antiquity, and its leaders’ responses, argues that individual yearnings and material circumstances are deeply interconnected and form the volatile core of a nation’s internal logic. Click here to find out how: Toward a Sustainable Ethics of Sexual Liberation: What Ancient Greece Can Teach Modern Progressives

Hugh Ryan is the recipient of the Foundation’s biennial Warren Johansson Book Award for his 2022 The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

Downstate is a play about a day in the life of four men living in a halfway house, each with a conviction for a sex offense involving minors. Yet Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Bruce Norris has won rave reviews questioning ‘What is too much?’ when it comes to punishing these crimes. Is Downstate an inflection point in public discourse about criminal justice? Click here for a review.

Two claims which can be decisively made about today’s teens and young adults – singling out this birth cohort from the ones that came before: young people today are experiencing significantly higher rates of unhappiness and mental illness, and they are also exhibiting a unique lack of sexual activity. Read a provocative deep dive into the reasons. Why Are Young People So Unhappy? – Mental Health, Sexual Development, Loss of Autonomy.

James Kirchick’s Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington gives the most complete history to date of gay and bisexual people, mostly male and deeply closeted, in the nation’s capital. These include elected politicians, high-ranking political appointees, prominent journalists, socialites, as well as scores of minor civil servants and even a few fringe non-political figures like the local pornographer Lynn Womack, who won a major victory for artistic freedom in the Supreme Court in 1962. Read a review here.

Allyn Walker’s 2021 A Long Dark Shadow led to a firestorm of controversy, stoked by the right and tabloid media. Within months of publication, the book led to the author’s ouster from a teaching post at Virginia’s Old Dominion University and recoil from scholars worried about academic freedom. But has the fairly conservative content of Walker’s book been overlooked amidst all the hubbub? Read a review here.

Hellfire Does Not Deter Crime: Prisoner Survey on Religion – In 2021, the Percy Foundation distributed questionnaires on religious beliefs and practice to the prisoners enrolled in its prison book program. A total of 526 questionnaires were returned to us. Our inquiry aimed to ascertain whether strong religiosity either in childhood upbringing or as adults prior to incarceration acts as a deterrent or risk factor in criminal propensity. Read more here.

Maia Kobabe’s Stonewall Book Award-winning graphic novel Gender Queer has been savaged by conservatives as targeting vulnerable youngsters with pornography and grooming them for a life of sexual deviance. Yet Kobabe’s message curiously accords with what the social conservatives themselves want for adolescents: no acknowledgment of pubertal changes, no sex, no gender reassignment, nothing but a state of suspended animation in pre-lapserian innocence. Whither the paradox? Read a review here.

The Significance of Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court argues her historical importance is not only as the first African-American woman on the high court, but as the only current member of the court with a background in criminal justice.

News and Resources

Ryan Conrad tapped as 2021 Charley Shively Prize winner – Canadian-based scholar, polemicist, and artist Ryan Conrad is recipient of the Foundation’s 2021 Charley Shively Prize for Gay Liberation. A co-founder of the publishing collective Against Equality, Conrad is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Toronto’s York University, writing on the history of grassroots Canadian AIDS videomaking. Conrad’s wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary work – on topics such as the relation of sexual minorities to mass incarceration and the straitjacket of “equality” as a holy grail for sexual politics – shows both a searching and uncompromising concern with justice and an unquenchable joie de vivre at the utopian potentials of erotic community. READ MORE HERE ...

Guest editorials – The Foundation is happy to post guest opinion pieces or reviews of notable books on topics of sexual diversity, rights, law, and history written by qualified scholars, activists, or those who have had contact with the criminal justice system. READ MORE HERE ...

Voluntary sexual relations among prisoners – Skewing male and young, and cut off from relationships and sexual outlets outside, prisoners frequently engage each other in sexual activity. In the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, voluntary sexual relationships are officially forbidden, with those caught often facing severe discipline. But prison administrators also sometimes respond with varying degrees of realism about sex among prisoners. What are the alternatives to prohibition? The articles and anecdotes here discuss the issues involved and offer data on this hard-to-assess and variable phenomenon. READ MORE HERE ...

Prison sex & prison rape – A literature review, covering consensual sex, sexual victimization, conjugal visitation, and more! READ MORE HERE ...

Do illegal images encourage child molestation? – Mere possession of child pornography (which includes images to fully sexually mature adolescents) is one of the most rapidly growing offenses prosecuted in the U.S. federal system, earning those convicted an average sentence of 12.5 years (according to Department of Justice statistics). Often, the images in question are old and feature mere nudity, little different from what is found in naturist literature and legitimate art photography. In this brief, a well-known criminologist and expert witness reviews the most recent scholarship on the question, and concludes that there is no credible link between viewing such images and committing hands-on offenses against minors. READ MORE HERE ...

Criminalization of sex workers – or their clients – both violates individual rights and prevents prostitutes and other sex workers from the regulation that has been shown to keep the "oldest profession" safe and offering a living wage. The equation of sex work with "human trafficking" – a concept heavily promoted by Western governments and NGOs but little analyzed – serves to strip sex workers of any volition and presents them as pure victims. The result in recent years has been an intensified regime of surveillance of migrants, travelers generally, sex workers, and customers – as well as large upticks in punishments in the U.S. for completely consensual activities. Sex workers and their allies around the world are organizing to fight for reasonable regulation and legal protection. READ MORE HERE ...

Transgender people face police abuse – While trans issues in the West are prominent in popular consciousness like never before, and legal barriers to fair treatment are tending to fall, police harassment and disregard, together with high levels of criminal victimization, continue. These articles offer an overview. READ MORE HERE ...

Over-the-counter contraception & youth rights – Access to contraception is a fundamental aspect of young persons' ability to make their own sexual choices. The recent articles discussed here present the scope of the problem of inaccessibility of female contraception in the U.S., E.U., and beyond, and as well, the shifting political debates and medical developments touching on the issue. READ MORE HERE ...

Battles over sex-ed – Research shows that giving young people the knowledge and tools to make informed decisions about sexuality leads to better choices, reducing unwanted pregnancies and risk of disease, while opening up space for vital discussions about feelings, relationships, and the range of human sexual responses. With a bias toward abstinence-ed in the U.S., the benefits of sex-ed often are not realized, and GLBT youth are often left out of the picture. The articles here offer an overview. READ MORE HERE ...

Mass incarceration – The U.S. represents 4.4% of the world population, but 22% of its prisoners. Unjust sentences for victimless or merely statutory offenses are a key part of the problem, together with racism and moralism about drugs and sex. Inmates face high levels of physical and sexual assault, and targets are often transgender people and others with disparaged sexual identities. READ MORE HERE ...

Fighting civil commitment – Some 7,000 individuals languish in locked facilities in the U.S. because of Kafka-esque statutes allowing indefinite detention (sex offense civil commitment) when the government has nothing more than a hunch you might in the future do something wrong of a sexual nature. Only a very small number have ever been released, even though the earliest of these facilities have existed as long as 28 years. In at least some states, more have died than have been released. In order to detain an individual for as much as the rest of their lives, the state need not prove any mental illness, only a potentially undefined mental "disorder" or a completely limitless, undefined "mental abnormality." Those who are civilly committed are, according to the Supreme Court, not being "punished," though these detention centers are usually no more than prisons, both in architecture and secured perimeters, and also in operating methods and restrictions and requirements of those confined. In a remarkable series of newsletters, The Legal Pad, a civilly-committed former attorney looks at the legal and social consequences of America's growing extra-legal gulag system. READ MORE HERE ...

Sexual minorities face more violence in prison – Incarceration tends to intensify forms of inequality and injustice prevalent in society. So it's no surprise that sexual and gender minorities often face higher rates of violence and maltreatment in jails and prisons. What's known and how are prisoners and allies taking action? READ MORE HERE ...

Fears about young people's sexuality hinder HPV vaccination efforts – HPV vaccine protects against cancers caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) infection – a common virus. About one in four people in the U.S. is infected, and some 14 million new infections every year. Encouraging vaccinations among young people is a public health priority, and over time could prevent more than 30,000 U.S. cancer cases a year. But vaccination campaigns face serious resistance and vaccination rates are lower than they should be. What's the problem? READ MORE HERE ...

Book reviews and commentary – What University of Michigan gay scholar David Halperin calls the “War on Sex” is generating more and more critical analysis. READ MORE HERE ...

Learning from History: Lessons for activism today – The GLBT movement has been one of the most successful social movements in the West in recent generations. Yet the struggle to fight sexual injustices and hysterias – now in new guises – seems greater than ever. READ MORE HERE ...