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Last year, Louisiana sparked a slew of sensational headlines when state legislators passed a law allowing surgical castration as punishment for people convicted of sex crimes against children. That was the first successful legislation in a new wave of bills proposing both chemical and surgical castration in states such as New Mexico, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
This March, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would make chemical castration a precondition of parole in sex offenses involving a child under the age of 13. As the bill headed over to the state senate, Republican Rep. Scott Fetgatter made its intent clear, saying, “I will fight for stricter laws against such offenders to better protect our kids.”
But while supporters of these bills echo that cause, many experts say the approach is needlessly cruel and lacks a sound scientific basis.
Castration — both reversible chemical and permanent surgical castration — does lead to the reduction of testosterone and a diminished libido. But “there is literally no evidence that testosterone is the driving factor of individuals committing crimes of a sexual nature,” said Kristen M. Budd, a senior analyst with the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization working to reduce the number of people behind bars in the U.S.
Castration is not a new idea. According to the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, doctors in the U.S. have been using hormone therapy — via off-label use of medications for conditions like prostate cancer — since the 1940s to lower the testosterone in men with “pathological sexual behavior.” Sandy Rozek, the communications director for the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, told The Marshall Project that she’s occasionally heard from people who want to avoid reoffending that the treatment plans they’ve created with their doctors have included surgical castration. Rozek draws a line between these self-appointed procedures and the criminal justice bills mandating castration as a condition of parole or as a court-ordered punishment.
“If your choice is between 10 more years in prison and castration, that’s not really a choice,” she said. “That’s coercion.”
The coercive nature of the state permanently or temporarily altering a man’s body in exchange for release is what led the courts in Michigan to deem the practice unlawful and experts like Budd to point out its similarity to 20th century eugenics, which resulted in the systematic sterilization of thousands of incarcerated women who were deemed “subnormal.”
Proponents like Democratic Louisiana Rep. Delisha Boyd, who co-authored the castration bill that became law in her state, believe that the harshness of the procedure is a self-evident deterrent against sex crime. Boyd, who comes from a family with a history of child sexual abuse, emphatically told NPR, “Even if just one rapist changes his mind about raping a child, I will take that.”
According to Gary Taylor, a researcher and professor who wrote an authoritative book on the history of castration, this strategy has long been practiced with the goal of inciting fear. Some ancient societies would kill enemies and cut off their testicles to intimidate future foes. The practice also permeated the antebellum and Jim Crow South, in which the extra-judicial lynchings of Black people were punctuated with castration as a form of White supremacist psychological terror, with the severed testicles often kept as souvenirs.
The bill Boyd co-authored made Louisiana the first state to allow judges to order surgical castration as a punishment, but there are at least 10 states that passed laws before 2008 to allow chemical or surgical castration as a condition of parole. California led the way in 1996. But despite these laws having been on the books for years, there is little information on how often states perform these procedures. A former sex crime prosecutor told the LAist in 2019 he never saw it done in Los Angeles.
Given the scant information available, the experts we spoke with are not aware of any concrete way to demonstrate that castration deters crime. But Rozek believes the claim is analogous to arguments made in favor of the death penalty, which numerous studies show offers no unique deterrent to violent crime. “People don’t stop and think about things like that when they are committing an offense,” she said. And like the death penalty, Budd is worried that when this punishment is performed, it will be done disproportionately to Black people who have White victims.
In terms of recidivism — whether a formerly incarcerated person reoffends — both Budd and Rozek note that people convicted of sex offenses are less likely than people convicted of other crimes to be rearrested after release. A study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that followed the post-prison lives of people across 30 states released in 2005 found that about 67% of people convicted of sex offenses were rearrested in the nine years following their release, compared with about 84% of people convicted of other crimes.
For those at risk of reoffending, they point to treatment programs, like cognitive behavioral therapy — which studies have consistently found to reduce sexual recidivism — over the unknowns of castration. Budd also notes that castration can further ostracize those who have committed crimes of a sexual nature. Instead of states investing millions into post-release punishments, such as sex offender registries, she believes society would be safer if lawmakers “actually created spaces for people who may have attraction to children to go seek help without fear.”
While a castration bill in South Carolina is still working its way through their legislature, and one in Oklahoma was withdrawn from an appropriation committee, the bills proposed earlier this year in New Mexico, Iowa and Mississippi have already died. Rozek takes no solace in this. “The first year out, most of the bills won't pass,” she said. “But this is just the first phase. They will come back.”
Similarly, Budd believes that with the bipartisan passing of the surgical castration law in Louisiana, we could see this punishment be adopted for other crimes. “It happened with sex offense registries,” she said. “Now you have violent offender registries in states like Ohio and Oklahoma that list people’s home address and their vehicle information once they're released from prison.”
While these punitive bills can boost legislators on both sides of the aisle hoping to look tough on crime, Budd warns that they can doom the formerly incarcerated looking for a clean start. “These laws take away hope, chance for change, and human dignity.”
