"Preventative corrections": psychiatric representation and the classification of sexually violent predators

This paper examines the representation of mental illness and mental disorder in the Washington Community Protection Act of 1990 (WCPA), the first package of sexual predator legislation passed in the United States. I focus on the public outcry over a violent crime committed by a repeat sexual offender, Earl Shriner, and show how the act was drafted in direct response to this outcry. Following his arrest, there was a public discussion of a) whether the state had a responsibility to cure individuals like Shriner before releasing them, and b) whether sex offenders could be cured at all. The WCPA was a landmark law because it shifted forensic psychology in the use of sexual criminals from an intervention model to a containment model, from a model that sought to separate out those sexual criminals who could be treated to a model that separated out sexual criminals because they could not be treated. I demonstrate here that this shift was made in response to the representation of Earl Shriner as a member of a group classified by legislators as having a coherent, recognizable and untreatable mental disorder that caused them to commit acts of sexual violence.