PEOPLE WHO COMMIT sexual harm have commonly experienced trauma as children or adults. Like most of us at some point in our lives, they could use therapy. But civil commitment is prison, and incarceration is psychologically destructive; indefinite detention borders on psychological torture — the opposite of therapy. Furthermore, the “treatment” arm of the sex offense legal regime asks us all to collaborate, recruiting the public, helping professions, schools, religious institutions, and even families to police the state’s boundaries between sexual normalcy and deviance. The radical approach to civil commitment is to stop thinking of sexual violence as a sociopathology from which the community must be safeguarded, and to turn instead to social and environmental approaches that engage the community in helping people who have done harm to live nonviolent lives.