LGBT identity and crime

Recent studies report that LGBT adults and youth disproportionately face hardships that are risk factors for criminal offending and victimization. Some of these factors include higher rates of poverty, overrepresentation in the youth homeless population, and overrepresentation in the foster care system. Despite these risk factors, there is a lack of study and available data on LGBT people who come into contact with the criminal justice system as offenders or as victims. Through an original intellectual history of the treatment of LGBT identity and crime, this Article provides insight into how this problem in LGBT criminal justice developed and examines directions to move beyond it. The history shows that until the mid-1970s, the criminalization of homosexuality left little room to think of LGBT people in the criminal justice system as anything other than deviant sexual offenders. The trend to decriminalize sodomy in the mid-1970s opened a narrow space for scholars, advocates, and policymakers to use antidiscrimination principles to redefine LGBT people in the criminal justice system as innocent and nondeviant hate crime victims, as opposed to deviant sexual offenders.