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By JOANNE MYERS on September 1, 2011

Published in: September-October 2011 issue.

Sex Panic and the Punitive State
by Roger N. Lancaster
University of California Press. 328 pages, $24.95 (paper)

SEX PANIC and the Punitive State is part polemic, part social history, and part personal story about the policing of sexual behavior in the United States. As I read the book, the policing of sexual behavior was very much in the news: the sexting scandal of now former Congressman Anthony Weiner and the arrest of IMF Chair Dominique Strauss–Kahn were competing as the distractions du jour.

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