Making Monsters: The Polygraph, the Plethysmograph, and Other Practices for the Performance of Abnormal Sexuality
| Author | Ralph Sandland,Andrew S. Balmer |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2012.00601.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 39, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2012
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 593±615
Making Monsters: The Polygraph, the Plethysmograph, and
Other Practices for the Performance of Abnormal Sexuality
Andrew S. Balmer* and Ralph Sandland**
This article addresses the use of the polygraph, penile plethysmograph,
and other practices for the management of sexual offenders as part of
the `Containment Approach', a strategy increasingly common in the
United States which is, in part, being trialled in the United Kingdom.
The polygraph has a tangled history with abnormal sexuality, as we
describe in the context of homosexuality in the 1960s. We examine how
these strategies target sex offenders as malleable in regard to sexual
performances but also, through notions of risk management, para-
doxically constitute offenders as fundamentally incurable and thus
permanently risky. Using Foucault's notion of the `abnormal', we
investigate the implications of this risk management/ performance
paradox. We conclude that it reveals a certain anxiety about the rela-
tionship between abnormal and normal sexual behaviour in contem-
porary sex-offender management discourse, which can help explain the
emergence of these practices.
INTRODUCTION
Although its scientific status has remained controversial since its design in
the early 1900s, the polygraph machine has become synonymous with `lie
detection', so much so that it is often simply referred to as the lie detector.
Although a great deal has been written about the polygraph as regards its
admissibility in United States criminal trials, very little has been written
about its use in the context of probation programmes and even less with a
specific emphasis on sex offender management. This is curious, since in the
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ß2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2012 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL,
England
andrew.balmer@manchester.ac.uk
** School of Law, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England
Ralph.Sandland@nottingham.ac.uk
United States the device has become ever more significant in this context,
and ± as we intend to demonstrate ± plays an important role in producing
knowledge about the sex offender and in the construction of his treatability
and disorder. That being said, important work has been carried out on the
role of the sex offender as part of the `new penology', some of which has
focused on the ever more potent forms of punishment to which he is subject.
However, this work has not engaged with the polygraph machine and only
touches upon the plethysmograph and other treatment practices. In this
article, we seek to provide a novel account of the emergence of the
polygraph in the management and treatment of sex offenders in the United
States and to provide some detail of its more recent spread to the United
Kingdom. We do so by weaving together a number of theories, including
several strands of Foucault's work and contemporary analyses of punishment
and criminal management, to examine the scientific and policy literature on
sex offender management. Thus, we describe the way in which the polygraph
has become entangled with sex, deviance and identity.
Our analysis begins with a description of its use as a mode of outing
homosexuals in the United States government; we then move into the subject
matter proper and argue that, in the United States in particular, the polygraph
machine is becoming an indispensable means of managing sex offenders.
The polygraph facilitates the creation of a particular kind of deviant
individual, in order that they become amenable to actuarial mechanisms of
risk prediction and to processes of self-control. Importantly, the use of the
polygraph, plethysmograph, and other practices in the treatment programmes
of sexual offenders is fundamentally tied to the performance of an altogether
alien, indeed `monstrous', identity. To begin, however, we briefly explain
the mode of operation of the machine more generally and outline some of its
historical development.
THE POLYGRAPH MACHINE
What Alder
1
calls `the American obsession' with lie detectors properly
began at Harvard in 1915 with Hugo Munsterberg's research into physio-
logical correlates of deception and his student William Marston who refined
this into the systolic blood pressure deception test. Marston and others
involved in the early life of the polygraph sought to quantify, compare, and
aggregate physiologica l records to make visible norma l and deviant
psychological states.
2
They treated the body as an instrument upon which
the emotions played, a body that responded to these emotions and could thus
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1 K. Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (2007).
2 K. Alder, `A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-
Century America' (2002) 80 Representations 1.
ß2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2012 Cardiff University Law School
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