「经济学人」Surgical solution

Why two black Democrats pushed for one of America’s most alarming crime bills

Delisha Boyd is the product of a rape. She reckons her mother was violated repeatedly from the age of 13, two years before she gave birth. Ms Boyd, a black Democratic state representative from New Orleans, told her story publicly for the first time when she introduced a bill to carve out rape and incest exceptions from Louisiana’s abortion ban in May of last year. “I can tell you today, in my mid-50s, that my mother never recovered from it. She was dead by the time she was 28 years old,” she said. The bill was voted down.

This spring she told her story again at the state’s capitol in Baton Rouge, to buttress a starkly different proposal. Her new bill, co-authored with another Democrat, authorises judges to sentence child-rapists to surgical castration upon release from prison.Tough-on-crime Republicans lined up to support the bill, the first of its kind in America, while the legislature’s black caucus and most Democrats opposed it. It passed resoundingly and on June 4th was sent to the governor for sign-off.

Ms Boyd says she has become fed up with watching her Republican colleagues torpedo efforts to protect children. Having failed on the defensive, she decided to go on the offensive, by punishing perpetrators. In doing so she has aligned herself with Republican lawmakers who ushered in a slew of other hardline policies that made this session the “worst” she has seen. The provisions include trying 17-year-olds as adults and expanding the use of nitrogen gas for executing convicts, a method that caused an inmate to writhe in pain when it was tested for the first time in Alabama in January. (Ms Boyd opposed both.)

Black Democratic colleagues told Ms Boyd her bill reminds them of how Southerners forcibly castrated slaves accused of rape. Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who issues court-ordered chemical castrations for paedophiles—a punishment legally enforceable, but rarely used, in 11 states—says the bill amounts to “legislators practising medicine without a licence”, something Republicans have been accused of when restricting abortion. Evidence on whether castration reduces recidivism is hazy.

If it is signed by the governor, the law will surely be taken to court. Litigators will argue that castration is “cruel and unusual punishment”, which is outlawed by the Eighth Amendment. But progressive lawyers in Louisiana reckon that it may well be upheld by the Fifth Circuit, America’s most conservative appeals court.

Ms Boyd is unfazed by the uproar her bill has caused—in fact, she revels in it. “The bill, for me, is doing exactly what I wanted the bill to do: it is creating the conversation.” She is adamant, however, that it is not about grandstanding. “If you force yourself on a five-year-old kid, you need to be dealt with and I don’t mean just prison time. I wish we could sentence them to death,” she says in tears. Ms Boyd is baffled by her opponents’ eagerness to fight for the rights of people who commit such vile acts. To those who say her bill is too harsh she fires back with a question that reliably makes them squirm: “Are you considering child rape yourself?”

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Surgical solution” (June 13th 2024)

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