When Punishment Becomes Care in Progressive Prosecution

• In Event: Violence, Policing, and Criminal Law

Abstract

Progressive prosecution has emerged as a reformist project aimed at using prosecutorial discretion to reduce racial disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system. Yet sex crimes remain conspicuously exempt from such progressive reforms. Drawing on 46 in-depth interviews with officials in District Attorney and U.S. Attorney offices in California who have worked on sex crime cases, this article examines why officials who otherwise espouse progressive values consistently adopt punitive approaches in sex crime cases. I develop the concept of therapeutic retribution to capture the legitimizing mechanism through which state officials narrate punishment of offenders as care for victims. Prosecutors cast themselves as advocates correcting the sexism that once silenced female victims, while also portraying sex crimes as morally unambiguous and politically neutral. This narration reimagines punitive prosecution in sex crime cases as social justice work, and therefore progressive. However, in presenting sex crimes as uniquely heinous and politically neutral, therapeutic retribution obscures racialized operations of state power and reaffirms the legitimacy of punitive control. By analyzing this carve-out within progressive prosecution, this study advances sociological understandings of how states mobilize discourses of care and compassion to sustain punitive authority and reproduce inequality.

Author

• Amelia Roskin-Frazee, University of California-Irvine