Castration As Substitute For Jailtime
The questions given are thus: should a convicted sexual offender be able to consent to surgical castration as a means of avoiding incarceration? Could a judge require this before a sexual offender is paroled? What are the ethics in these cases?
The answer to the first question can be nothing but an outright no. While it has been the case before, we have no reason to allow criminals to trade body parts for the punishment and sentencing they have shown themselves to deserve. This is especially true when the amputation involved is actually no real guarantee that the offender will repeat their crime. While seeming like an extreme scenario (and it is), removal of such an offender’s testicles is not necessarily going to eliminate his capacity to assault or molest a child, minor, or even adult. In a similar case, a man convicted of sexual battery on a minor and lewd and lascivious behavior had requested surgical castration as a means of avoiding what would be an almost certain life-sentence. This man was arrested for performing oral sex on an eleven-year-old1 . He did not need his penis or testicles for this heinous act. One might argue that with the loss of the testicles, sex-drive is decreased very much. This is true, but with hormone therapy it can resurface, and while it would not necessarily be easy for a convicted sex offender to get ahold of testosterone injections, it would not, by any means, be impossible. Even the drop in ability to maintain an erection would not necessarily curb the behavior, as often times in situations of rape (and this is especially true in matters of molestation), that the act in itself is less about sex, and more about the gaining of control and/or power that they feel is missing in their life2, and there are means of taking that control sexually without your own genitalia. In short, the simple removal of a body part cannot be taken as penance for a crime committed. After all, we don’t allow the chopping off of a theif’s hand...
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