from Judith Levine's review of Roger N. Lancaster's "Sex Panic and the Punitive State" in the Monthly Review:
Among this country’s unprecedented legions of inmates and parolees, people of color are vastly disproportionate. For example, the percentage of young African-American men in prison is higher than it was in the Jim Crow South, when prisoners were leased out as slave labor.
Yet sex offenders are white—not only on the prison rolls but also in the public imagination. Why is this so and how did it come to be? It is a puzzle that critics of the penal state have not solved—and rarely approach. The facts are simply too hard to square with the usually correct view that the carceral state is the latest iteration of a systemic repression of black and brown people.
So this is probably the most valuable and original contribution of Sex Panic: Lancaster’s treatment of the “racing” and “queering” of the sex offender and its effect on what now masquerades as civic solidarity.
http://monthlyreview.org/2012/02/01/first-they-came-for-the-sex-offenders