The overlap of treatment and punishment in the sex offense legal regime is a part of a process critics refer to as medicalization: the reconception of differences or problems as medical or psychiatric disorders — frequently constructed as biologically caused — that need to be prevented, diagnosed, or treated. Marginalized sexual desires or acts considered immoral at a given time, like homosexuality, are often subject to medicalization, turning “badness to sickness,” as sociologists Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider write in their 1980 classic Deviance and Medicalization. But the slippage is not just between nature and culture; it is also between the moral and the legal. Asked how she defined sexual deviance, the therapist in Dallas replied, “Deviance is anything that’s against the law.”

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.

What we need are paradigm shifts: from justice as retribution to justice as healing, from conviction to accountability, punishment to repair, and rehabilitation to transformation. Movements for transformative and restorative justice are not just for institutions, nonprofits, or, simply, someone else. All of us need to step away from the systems to which we have outsourced the responsibility to deal with harm and make us safer.

If we want to end violence, we have to divest from the industries of punishment and surveillance and invest in what allows people and communities to flourish. And to invest in economic, political, and social systems that put people — all people — before profit, we must never abandon children, or anyone else, to endure or defend themselves when they are subjected to sexual harm. But the United States abandons people in countless ways — leaving them without decent housing, health care, clean water, and so much else. The sex offense legal regime displaces real protection with a false sense of security at the same time as it incites terror to justify itself. Like the rest of the criminal legal system, it disproportionately targets people of color. It exiles a permanent class of sexual pariahs — now nearly a million — from the rights of residency, citizenship, and humanity itself. It is long past time to overthrow the regime.