New York

Down With Spitzer's Sinister "Sex Offender" Law!

The New York State legislature recently enacted by an overwhelming vote a sweeping law under which “sex offenders” can be locked up for indefinite periods after they have completed their prison sentences. This reactionary law was pushed by Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer, who was elected in November with the enthusiastic support of the state’s labor officialdom. Similar “civil commitment” laws already exist in 19 other states, as capitalist politicians whip up a frenzy in the population against “sexual predators.” President Bush has signed a law offering money to states that commit sex offenders beyond their prison term, and the Justice Department is creating a federal civil commitment program.

Make no mistake: these measures represent an attack on the fundamental rights of the entire population. The New York law in effect means a life sentence that would ensnare many who have done nothing more than engage in consensual sex, which is no crime in the eyes of revolutionary Marxists or by the lights of any rational society. The law throws the fundamental Constitutional protection against double jeopardy out the window, with “offenders” effectively charged twice for the same crime, and allows retroactive prosecution for “crimes” committed before the law was passed. Even if not convicted, a person merely accused of a “sex crime” can be indefinitely “committed” if that person pleaded guilty to another offense.

Most ominously, people are being locked up not because they have committed a specific crime but because a court decides that there is a high probability that they might commit one in the future. According to the New York Times (4 March): “Actuarial formulas—akin to the tables used for life insurance—play a central role in deciding who is dangerous enough to be committed. They calculate someone’s risk of offending again by looking at factors such as the number of prior sex offenses and the sex of the victims.... Politics and emotion also factor heavily into who gets committed.” Nearly 3,000 “sex offenders” have been committed nationally since the first such law was passed in 1990. A mere 8 percent have since been released from commitment—in a number of cases because of terminal illness or old age.

To push through this major escalation in the state’s repressive powers, capitalist politicians and the major media willfully conflate such horrible crimes as the 2005 rape and murder of a Florida girl with consensual sexual activity. Genarlow Wilson, a 20-year-old black man, languishes in a Georgia prison on a mandatory ten-year sentence with no hope of parole simply for engaging in consensual oral sex three years ago with a younger schoolmate, a case exemplifying racist and anti-sex bigotry in the U.S. (see “Free Genarlow Wilson!” WV No. 887, 2 March).

We are uncompromisingly opposed to the criminalization of consensual sex. As we wrote in “The Uses of Abuse” (Women and Revolution No. 29, Spring 1985): “The violent abuse and rape of children is a terrible crime. The problem is that once the question of ‘child abuse’ has become a political football, the state willfully will not tell the difference between Jack the Ripper and Lewis Carroll. A stranger who lurks in school yards, offers candy to a little girl then rapes and maims her and a father who takes showers with his prepubescent daughter are both telescoped into a common juridical scheme.”

The nightmarish sweep of the new measures was illustrated by the 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kansas v. Hendricks that upheld the constitutionality of “civil commitment” of those having a “mental abnormality.” This standard threatens anyone the bourgeoisie deems as deviating from the reactionary moral straitjacket of the monogamous family. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Morton Berger, an Arizona high school teacher, who was sentenced to 200 years in prison, with no possibility of parole, for child pornography—ten years for each of 20 images in his possession. Even an Arizona state Supreme Court judge noted that the sentence was “longer than the presumed sentence for rape or aggravated assault” and that “Berger would serve no more time for actually molesting a child” (Arizona Daily Star, 10 May 2006).

What is truly perverse is to equate looking at pornography with committing violent crimes. Child pornography, like all porn, is simply words and images designed for pleasure. We call for abolishing all laws against “crimes without victims” such as prostitution, drug use and pornography. We also oppose reactionary “age of consent” laws; our guiding principle is simply that of effective consent. Government out of the bedrooms!

The crazed morality drives whipped up by the bourgeoisie, the churches and the media serve to regiment the population and to distract the working people from the very real evils of this decaying capitalist system. It is grotesque that the capitalist rulers posture as defenders of the country’s youth. In the U.S., 37 percent of all children—58 percent of black children, and 62 percent of Latino children—live at or below the official poverty line. In New York City, fewer than 35 percent of 16- to 24-year-old youth have any kind of job. Last month, the number of homeless families in New York City reached a record high.

“Civil commitment” laws are only one part of an escalating wave of repression against so-called “sex crimes.” Fully 22 states now impose restrictions on where “sex offenders” can live after their release from prison. These regulations are so extensive that a number of prisoners have had their release delayed for years simply because there was nowhere they could live. California’s Proposition 83, which passed in November, requires, among other measures, that “sex offenders” wear an electronic ankle bracelet for the rest of their lives, providing for Global Positioning System monitoring of their every movement, a measure already the law in Massachusetts. Every state has “sex offender” registries, and about half post them on the Internet. This includes Maine, where William Elliott was gunned down last year after being put on the list because he had had sex with his girlfriend before she turned 16. Now, in a blatant invitation to more such vigilante violence, Ohio plans to issue fluorescent green “sex offender” automobile license plates.

In racist capitalist America, repressive measures come down especially hard on blacks and other minorities, and repression of “sexual predators” is no exception. In a tradition going back to the Jim Crow South and lynch mob “justice,” black men today are disproportionately convicted of rape. Pointing to the racist underpinnings of those convictions, black men account for fully 65 percent of those whose convictions have been overturned by DNA and other evidence. In half of those exonerations, the black men were falsely accused of raping white women. Not coincidentally, the only New York state senators who voted against Spitzer’s “civil commitment” law were from heavily black and Hispanic New York City. Senator Kevin Parker of Brooklyn made the self-evident point that the racist cops would use the law to target minorities.

The shadow of the lynch mob is also apparent in the barbaric notion that the way to deal with male “sexual predators” is to castrate them. According to the Washington Post (5 July 2006), “Eight states allow the use of drugs to castrate sex offenders, including California, Florida and Texas, where surgical castration is also an option.” The article noted that in Florida, “judges are required to order castration for certain repeat offenders.” This is a throwback to the early 20th century, when the racist eugenics movement, which dominated the U.S. scientific establishment at the time, endorsed castration and sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and “habitual criminals.” Today, as the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (Vol. 33, No. 1, 2005) remarked, many prisoners “may view surgical castration as their only realistic option for release into the community.” Several years ago a Virginia inmate named James Jenkins castrated himself with a razor blade the night before a judge was to consider committing him to a prison for high-risk “sex offenders.”

In New York, Eliot Spitzer has used his landslide electoral victory in November to not only push through the draconian “civil commitment” law but to take the ax to public schools and to try to impose devastating health care cuts amounting to $1.2 billion, aimed mostly at hospitals and nursing homes. The state Health Department has directed nine hospitals to start shutting down and dozens of other facilities to carry out cutbacks. Democrat Spitzer’s budget-slashing fits right in with multibillion-dollar cuts in Medicare and Medicaid announced by Republican president Bush.

Complicit in Spitzer’s attacks on working people is the pro-capitalist New York labor officialdom, which pulled out all the stops to see him elected. Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 president Roger Toussaint energetically campaigned for Spitzer despite the fact that Spitzer, then the state attorney general, threw Toussaint in jail as punishment for the December 2005 NYC transit strike, which defied the state’s Taylor Law ban on public employee strikes. TWU members and the union as a whole suffered massive fines as part of Spitzer’s anti-strike injunctions. Spitzer was also supported by Dennis Rivera, outgoing president of the 1199 SEIU health care workers union, who abjectly declared before the elections that he would not oppose the planned hospital closings.

New laws against “sex offenders” are only one component of the growth in the capitalist state’s repressive reach. More than one generation of black and Latino youth have been subject to mass incarceration, mainly as a result of the “war on drugs.” More recently, repressive laws enacted as part of the reactionary “war on terror” initially singled out Near Eastern and other Muslim immigrants. But as we warned from the outset of this bogus “war,” such measures would eventually extend to black people, the working class and the citizenry as a whole. A broad range of public opinion now recognizes that the USA Patriot Act has opened the door to restricting the rights of the entire population. The same point must be hammered home in regard to repression of “pedophiles” and anyone else considered to be deviant or a “threat” by the government. The Bay Area Labor Black League for Social Defense defended a black former convict, Cary Verse—who underwent chemical castration in a state mental hospital after serving his prison sentence—and Father Donald Weeks, who sheltered him, against vigilante harassment in 2004 (see “Labor Black League Protests ‘Sex Offender’ Witchhunt,” WV No. 824, 14 April 2004).

As revolutionary opponents of the capitalist system, the Spartacist League seeks to build a workers party in the tradition of the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the proletariat to victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Such a party, as Lenin pointed out in What Is To Be Done? (1902), must act as “the tribune of the people...able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.” Only in this way can the most conscious layers of the working class be won to the understanding of the proletariat’s historic mission—to sweep away the decaying capitalist order through proletarian revolution.