no minimum wage for civilly committed sex offenders
After they have served their court-ordered prison terms, people convicted of sex crimes are often civilly committed, ostensibly for treatment. When the acting warden at the Wisconsin Resource Center cut the pay of these patients/detainees from the minimum wage of $6.50 per hour to as little as $1.94 per hour, several filed lawsuits.
Since they were not prisoners, the residents argued they should qualify for the minimum wage just like any other employee. According to Business Week, Wisconsin's District 2 Court of Appeals rejected their argument on Wednesday. Judge Daniel Anderson, writing for the court, said the patients "do not need the minimum wage to protect their well being" since they are "cared for by the state."
I've argued in print that the hyperstigma applied to sex offenders approaches caste-like levels of second-class citizenship in the United States (though I never got around to that screenplay). The minimum wage example is just one of many legal and ethical paradoxes of sex offender civil commitment. What rights and liberties obtain for those who are no longer prisoners but will likely die behind bars?
posted by christopher uggen @ 7:13 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
You are right about hyper-stigma, and there is a caste system in the US involving sex offenders. It is the Us vs. Them mentality that is eerily similar to Germany in the early 1930's when some non-Jewish people decided that Jewish people were sub-human. Current public opinion in this country is moving toward the view that all sex offenders are sub-human. Even the wrongfully convicted ones.
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Caste is usually a condition in which you are born into. I'm not sure that this applies to the case of sex offenders. However, with that being said, it seems like an add-on to the caste system.
Sex offenders are the new monsters in society and apparently serve some useful purpose as such. We have noticed that as gay people became more socially acceptable, the youths that used to "fag-bash" appear to have switched in many instances to bashing homeless people. This can be detected in the structure of how the activity takes place - offending by groups of young men 16 or 17 years old, expressive violence, and bragging afterward. We need to investigate the Perv Patrol in order to understand what is fueling this moral panic. Who are the moral entrepreneurs? And why are they doing this?
Caste system, yes! But we have many castes within this system (long-term) that more legitimately fit the definition of caste.
Thanks, Tom and Dallas. It will take some folks with real guts and a thick skin to challenge the hyper-stigmatization of sex offenders.
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