Despite Gayle Rubin’s (1984) call for a new analysis of sex three decades ago, social scientists remain squeamish when it comes to studying sex. When scholars have attended to the social regulation of sex, they have generally focused on LGBT identities, communities, and politics. Of course, the attention to the construction of LGBT communities, cultures, and civil rights movements is warranted; their rise represents a seismic social change. The Supreme Court of the United States first legally recognized this shift in its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which many observers interpreted as overturning state sodomy laws that criminalized non-procreative sex. In the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s now-infamous Lawrence dissent, he warned that the Court’s decision would pave the way for same-sex marriage – a comment that has proven impressively prescient as same-sex marriage is now the law of the land (see Obergefell v. Hodges). While incomplete, the resignification of the homosexual from pedophile to picket fences is, indeed, a dramatic social transformation.

But while this powerful progressive narrative is appealing, it does not provide a complete picture of how the state regulates sexuality – or even the legacies of Obergefell or Lawrence. At precisely the same time that activists were securing marriage rights for same-sex couples, courts and “tough on crime” legislatures nationwide were devising new ways to punish sex. As it turns out, anti-sodomy laws supposedly struck down by Lawrence are, in fact, still on the books; police continue to invoke them against the very same kinds of people they did before Lawrence – namely women sex workers and men caught having sex with other men in public venues. While AIDS activists successfully resisted punitive control measures such as quarantine and extreme proposals such as tattooing those infected with HIV, they were unable in many states to prevent legislatures from enacting new criminal laws that made it a crime for HIV-infected individuals to have sex without disclosing their status. In more recent years, a concern over sex trafficking has sparked resurgence in punitive policies aimed at controlling sexual labor.

But the most glaring expansion of the carceral state aimed at regulating sex has been the invention of publicly accessible sex offender registries. Borne out of the mid-century sex crime panic, registries were first concocted in California in 1947, but were not widely adopted until the 1990s. Recent estimates suggest that more than 750,000 Americans are registered sex offenders. Their ranks include individuals convicted of a broad range of offenses, from statutory rape to indecent exposure to sexual assault; many are first time offenders locked up for nonviolent offenses. Yet, despite the massive scale of these registries, the social science literature examining their application is vastly underdeveloped. I contribute to our understanding of sex offender registries by grappling with two questions.

First, what is the relationship between the larger carceral state and sex offender registries? At first glance, the recent spike in the number of Americans registered as sex offenders would seem to reflect a more general trend towards using handcuffs and prisons as a response to social problems. Indeed, a wealth of scholarship has demonstrated that incarceration rates spiraled out of control beginning in the 1980s. However, my analysis reveals that correctional supervision rates have declined in recent years nationally at the same time that rates of sex offender registration have increased substantially.

Second, who is being caught up in the net of sex offender registration? While Judith Levine (forthcoming) has noted that sex offenders are perceived to be white, middle-aged men, few empirical studies have analyzed whether sex offenders are more or less likely to be white than the general population. In this analysis, I compare United States Census demographic data against a unique cross-sectional dataset of currently registered sex offenders in 49 states to examine racial disparities in sex offender registration rates. As I show, Black men are disproportionately impacted by these policies and my findings suggest that nearly 1% of all Black men in the United States are registered sex offenders.

Finally, I conclude by considering what it means that the state has developed a free-moving arm of the carceral state that is specifically tailored to punishing sex. I argue that sex offender registries may represent a new approach to what Jonathan Simon (2007) terms “governing through crime.” At the same time that the war on drugs was losing its cultural legitimacy, legislatures devised sex offender registries that allowed the carceral state to expand even as social movements called punitive drug laws into question. Most troubling for LGBT activists and scholars, sex offender registries appear to be motivated by the inaccurate perception that sexual offenders are more likely to reoffend and thus require special control – a view that echoes the LGBT movement’s notion that sexuality is an innate characteristic. By analyzing the relationship between the carceral state, sexuality, and race, these findings suggest new directions for sexuality scholarship and activism that considers how punishment shapes sexual politics in America.