ABSTRACT
In May 1989, Earl Shriner dragged a seven-year-old boy off his bicycle and into the woods near the boy’s home in Tacoma, Washington. The boy was raped, choked, sexually mutilated and left for dead. At the time, Shriner had a 24-year history of violence and sexual assault, for which he had been in and out of institutions since the age of fifteen. He had been released from prison two years earlier, after serving a ten-year sentence for the kidnapping and assault of two teenage girls. While in prison, he had bragged of his sadistic fantasies. Prison officials had sought to have him committed to a secure state hospital rather than released because of the risk he posed, but psychiatric evaluations concluded that he did not meet the legal criteria for confinement because he did not suffer from a recognised mental disorder that rendered him an immediate and substantial danger to others. Intense public outrage was inflamed and given expression through sensational media coverage of the crime. In 1990, the state of Washington passed the Community Protection Act, the first in a wave of statutes allowing for the indefinite civil commitment of sexual offenders considered to pose a threat to public safety. Twenty states had similar civil commitment laws by the end of 2007, with over 4,500 sex offenders under continuing confinement after serving their prison sentence (Gookin 2007). Such an offender is typically labelled a ‘sexually violent predator’ or SVP.
