LGBT Identity and Crime

Abstract

Recent studies report that LGBT adults and youth disproportionately face hardships that scholars have long-viewed as risk factors for criminal offending and victimization. Some of these factors include higher rates of poverty, overrepresentation in the youth homeless population, and overrepresentation in the foster care system. In spite of these risk factors, there is a lack of study and available data on LGBT people who come into contact with the criminal justice system as offenders or as victims.Through an original intellectual history of the treatment of LGBT identity and crime, this Article provides insight into how this problem in LGBT criminal justice developed and examines directions to move beyond it. The history shows that until the mid-1970s, the criminalization of homosexuality left little room to think of LGBT people in the criminal justice system other than as deviant sexual offenders. The trend to decriminalize sodomy in the mid-1970s opened a narrow space for scholars, advocates, and policymakers to use anti-discrimination principles to redefine LGBT people in the criminal justice system as innocent and non-deviant hate crime victims, as opposed to deviant sexual offenders. Although this paradigm shift has contributed to some important gains for LGBT people, this Article argues that it cannot be celebrated as an unequivocal triumph. This shift has left us with flat understandings of LGBT offenders as sexual offenders and flat understandings of LGBT victims as hate crime victims. These one-dimensional narratives miss many criminal justice problems that especially fall on LGBT people who bear the brunt of inequality in the criminal justice system — including LGBT people of color, transgender people, undocumented LGBT people, and low-income and homeless LGBT people. The Article concludes by showing how ideas and methods in criminology offer promise to enhance accounts of LGBT offending and LGBT victimization, and in turn, inform law, policy, and the design of criminal justice institutions to better respond to the needs and experiences of LGBT offenders and LGBT victims.