ABSTRACT
We begin the concluding chapter by returning to the fact that ‘who’ constitutes a sex offender changes across time, space, and place, in accordance to the temporally relevant understanding of sexual mores of their time, will continue to change—despite some underlying tenants of what is considered most ‘evil.’ We then tie discussions of biopolitics, masculinities, emotions, precarity, stigma, and abjection together and draw out implications for policy, practice, and programming, answering the greater questions of what such realities mean for sex offenders, criminal justice staff, and societies more generally. We show how we attempted to move the discussion of the chimeric sex offender away from its more damaging cleavages that, in the end, reinforce conceptions of sex offenders as permanently sick and dangerous and explain that, what sex offenders teach us, is that there are many pitfalls internationally that characterize penal populist approaches to sex offenders. Overall, we reinstate our argument that when we misunderstand criminalized populations like sex offenders we become fascinated with that which we seek to suppress, as seen in the many television shows that document the life and arrests of sex offenders as well as the justices and injustices each experiences.
