The Seductions of Crimesploitation: The Apprehension of Sex Offenders on Primetime Television

I. Introduction: Spectacles of Crime and Punishment in Neoliberal America

In the late twentieth century, depictions of actual human beings engaging in criminal activity, being apprehended by police, or experiencing formal or informal punishment began flooding Americans’ television screens. From the premier of Cops and America’s Most Wanted in 1988, half-hour or hour-long, pseudo-journalistic programs about law enforcement have evolved into a reality television sub-genre of their own, one we call crimesploitation. ¹ Since then, over two dozen crime-centered reality television series have hit the airwaves, inviting audiences to watch those who break the rules suffer the consequences. ²

None created as humiliating a spectacle of degradation, however, as NBC’s production of To Catch a Predator (2004–2007). The show began as a single story on NBC’s newsmagazine Dateline about the sexual dangers that strangers pose to teenagers on the Internet. In an undercover operation NBC set up in conjunction with the online vigilante organization Perverted Justice, representatives of Dateline posed as young teenagers in online chat rooms, engaged in sexual conversations with adult men, and invited them to a suburban home. When the men arrived, they were beckoned into the home from afar by an adult decoy dressed as a minor and then confronted by reporter Chris Hansen. The segment was so popular that Dateline repeated it multiple times, eventually dedicating entire hours to the reports and rebroadcasting them on its cable network, MSNBC. The show featured some of the most humiliating and degrading content found in crimesploitation programs. Those confronted would be recorded by hidden cameras as Hansen read excerpts from sexually explicit fantasies they had shared online. Their humiliation would then be amplified when camera operators entered the room, and again when Hansen revealed himself to be a television news reporter who intended, to the offender’s horror, to expose their illicit sexual fantasies on national television.

Outwardly, the program served as an ideological buttress to two of the larger ideological shifts that underlay the massive expansion of the criminal justice system in the late twentieth century. First, in packaging itself as a crime prevention tool for parents, the show was symptomatic of a neoliberal political landscape created by Democrats and Republicans in the 1980s and 1990s, one in which the government’s affirmative obligations to the health and well-being of its citizens in all areas of their lives – from eldercare to crime control – had shrunk dramatically. ³ Second, it also sought to reinforce an ideology we call “law and order punitivism,” an illiberal, reactionary discourse that arose out of the backlash against the Warren Court’s criminal jurisprudence and the fear generated by the dramatic rise of violent crime in the 1960s. This ideology celebrates police or executive authority while casting suspicion on judicial decision making; bemoans commitments to due process and the rights of criminal defendants; ⁴ constructs criminals in simplistic terms as evil and monstrous others; presents victims as innocents whose purity and goodness the community affirms in the act of punishment; and, finally, authorizes the harsh, extra-legal, and humiliating elements of punishment as crucial and necessary counterparts to its modern, rule-bound, institutional logics. ⁵

Scholars have read crimesploitative programs like To Catch a Predator as spectacles that reinforce these ideologies. They gratuitously arouse their audiences’ “baser instincts” or “enthrall” them, presenting images of punishment “in a manner that is not easily conducive to analysis or self-reflection.” ⁶ But what is less obvious – and what we want to suggest to scholars of the cultural lives of neoliberalism and harsh punishment – is that the show might be plausibly read as a spectacle that reveals and attempts to alleviate the psychological pressures and tensions that are embedded in these ideologies. Both neoliberalism and “law and order” punitivism rely on classically liberal understandings of the self as autonomous, self-owning, and self-governing – what we will refer to as “liberal subjectivity.” Liberal subjectivity undergirds the retributive understanding of offenders as persons endowed with a level of agency that makes them solely responsible for their malfeasances and deserving of the harsh consequences that follow them. And in a neoliberal era in which the state has dramatically retrenched its commitment to being a guarantor of the health and welfare of the population, everyday citizens have been imagined as possessing the capacity and the responsibility for preventing criminal harms that may befall themselves and their families.

To Catch a Predator didn’t simply reinforce liberal subjectivity; it registered illicit fantasies and anxieties that seem to reflect the psyche of an age when governance has become increasingly premised on self-control and in which those who fail to govern themselves are demonized, punished, and socially excluded. In such a context, illiberal thoughts and desires, including a fantasy of not being responsible for one’s self, emerge as both a source of illicit pleasure and distracting anxiety. In its depiction of men seeking sex with young adolescents, To Catch a Predator, we argue, captures these dynamics. It dramatizes the loss of control over the self, exposing the men’s socially disorganizing fantasies and calling into question their capacity to repress them. In both form and content, the show offers viewers vicarious, pleasurable relief from the demand that they censor their anti-social impulses, while simultaneously offering reassurances that their own fantasy life, replete with those unacted-upon impulses, can remain a private source of pleasure that is materially and morally inconsequential.

We advance this reading of the show in two ways. First, we illustrate it by examining the show’s normative structure, arguing that it provides opportunities for viewers to identify as illicit boundary transgressors as well as boundary policers. ⁷ Second, we justify it by examining the legal and popular discourse produced in the aftermath of the suicide of one of its “predators.” This discourse reveals the degree to which the show was bound, in the legal and popular imagination, by tacit rules about a person’s mental sovereignty and the protection it offers to his illicit fantasies. To Catch a Predator ultimately drove itself out of business by violating those rules in its quest to ramp up its punitive thrills.

Ultimately, our case study demonstrates the degree to which crimesploitative texts are not as ideologically flat or stable as they may outwardly appear. Ideology, as Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey have shown, is not a fixed normative vision of the world but a continuous process of maintaining consent to a set of power arrangements. It works through contradictions rather than in spite of them. ⁸ As texts that reflect and reinforce dominant discourses about crime and social welfare, crimesploitation programs’ effectiveness lies in their capacity to successfully identify and recuperate, rather than ignore, the anxieties and critiques generated by those discourses. The failure of To Catch a Predator, we suggest, provides a valuable reminder that criminal and penal spectacles operate no differently than other ideological instruments and are vulnerable to the subversion of their intended or official meanings. ⁹

II. Sex Offenders, Liberal Subjects, and Masochists

Cultural historian and sexuality scholar David Savran has drawn connections between the historical invention of the liberal, rights-bearing subject and the rise of a discourse about masochistic sexual desire during the Enlightenment (“the most universalized and ubiquitous of the perversions” to eighteenth-century thinkers, he argues ¹⁰ ). The awareness that some human beings take pleasure out of being sexually degraded and humiliated was, Savran argues, a by-product of the new identity that emergent capitalism created and that philosophers like John Locke elaborated: the liberal self. For adult men, this was an identity ridden with contradiction. Participation in an industrial economy required both an image of the worker as free (and thus able to enter into and exit from wage labor contracts with relative ease), yet the hierarchical structure of the workplace required that he be self-disciplined and obedient to authority, censoring his desires when they undermined the demands of productivity. “Aspiring to freedom and reason,” Savran argues, the liberal subject “must, to prosper, disavow the knowledge that his independence requires submission to an economic system in which he remains a cog, and a despotic superego that has internalized the law, the father, and the word.” ¹¹ In modernity, the pleasurable, empowering sensation of freedom required painful self-denying acts of self-restraint, and sexual masochism registered erotically the way this paradoxical experience of freedom confounded pleasure and pain. For Savran, then, masochism was not abhorrent, but formed part of the “very structure of male subjectivity as it was consolidated in Western Europe during the early modern period,” and the masculine identities it makes possible “are deeply contradictory, eroticizing submission and victimization while trying to retain a certain aggressively virile edge, offering subject positions that have been marked historically as being both masculine and feminine, white and black.” ¹²

Following Savran’s understanding of the relationship between liberal subjectivity and masochism, we suggest that To Catch a Predator was compelling not only because it appealed to a sadistic desire to watch others be punished and humiliated, but also because it dramatized the experience of being a self in a punitive, neoliberal era, one in which binary notions of good and bad have been mapped onto people to justify the unequal distribution of wealth and vulnerability to criminal punishment across the population. To Catch a Predator’s spectacular eroticization of punishment appealed to a desire to alleviate the burdens of being responsible for one’s self in two distinctive (and somewhat opposed) ways. First, it appealed to a hedonistic desire to override one’s own internal censors by depicting men acting on illicit fantasies of satisfying an outrageous sexual appetite (hedonism). ¹³ Second, it appealed to a masochistic desire to be enslaved; prostrate on the ground, handcuffed, feminized, To Catch a Predator’s unwilling star surrenders to authority and, in so doing, erotically discharges the burdens of governing himself onto another. ¹⁴

To be sure, none of this was explicit. The show actively repressed its own hedonistic and masochistic qualities by encouraging viewers to identify as neither authority figure nor criminal offender, but as concerned parent. And in presenting the humiliation it doled out as a potential deterrent to would-be offenders it actively denied the existence of the masochistic qualities that, we argue, are embedded in it. Our task here, then, is not to argue what we cannot prove – that viewers identify with offenders and are drawn to the show, consciously or unconsciously, by its appeal to their illiberal fantasies. It is instead to use the content of the program and a lawsuit it occasioned to argue that it set up multiple points of identification for viewers in addition to the one it outwardly established. And given the degree to which the show invited viewers to identify as the offenders as well as the authorities on the program, we argue that it was more than a flat-footed attempt at promulgating the ideologies of neoliberalism and “law and order” punitivism.

Instead, the show sought to embed these ideologies by actively engaging with the fantasies and anxieties that could, if not managed successfully, undermine them: the Freudian desire to violate taboos that many in the population acknowledge experiencing; the fear that the Internet can expand the boundaries of the self and, in the process, make illicit fantasizing an activity that is more dangerous than it was before the advent of such technology; the existential fantasy of escaping responsibility for restraining the self. Indeed, when read from the perspective of the hedonic or masochistic offender, To Catch a Predator becomes a spectacle about fantasies. Through its construction, elaboration, and eroticization of literal boundaries that the men pass as they transform their fantasies into reality, the show enacted the forbidden desire to descend into an inferior being who must be governed by the rod rather than the conscience. But in fetishizing those boundaries, and in showing the punishment that follows their transgression, the show ultimately and, to audiences, perhaps reassuringly, reinforced their existence.

III. The Seductive Appeal of To Catch a Predator

Jack Katz’s (1988) Seductions of Crime established a phenomenological approach to the study of crime, examining the states of consciousness occupied by those who commit crime before, during, and after the act. ¹⁵ Whereas criminology has traditionally focused on various aspects of criminals’ ‘‘backgrounds’’ – either their psychological makeup or social conditions ¹⁶ – Katz focused on the “phenomenal foreground” ¹⁷ of criminals, their perceptions of themselves and their “world” during the criminal act. He found that many crimes entail a psychological “process through which a person empowers the world to seduce him to criminality.” ¹⁸

Katz did not address the phenomenology of sex crimes, but we argue that To Catch a Predator inadvertently offered a popularized account of it that complements his work. Through its depiction of the exchanges between men seeking sex with adolescents and adults posing as adolescents and its “will-he-or-won’t-he?” suspense over whether the men will move from virtual contact to physical contact, To Catch a Predator served as a kind of popular rendering of the Katzian question, “What is the psychological experience of acting out an illegal sexual fantasy?” The show suggested an experience that Katz identified as common across a wide array of crimes: criminals frequently articulate the illegal act as the result of seduction by forces outside themselves that they, in turn, have stoked and provoked. Those who commit crime are often “playing with the line between the sense of themselves as subject and object, between being in and out of control, between directing and being directed by the dynamics of the situation.” ¹⁹

In both its content and its aesthetics, the show, as we demonstrate below, presented this phenomenology to viewers in ways that invited them to imagine themselves as the deviant sex offenders undergoing shifts in consciousness as well as the righteous authority figures vanquishing evil. The show’s decision to make its pseudo-victims sex-desiring early-adolescents rather than pre-pubescent children enhanced the possibility that men in its viewing audience would be able to identify with the men on screen. The show’s decoys posed as 12- to 15-year-old minors, the age of pubescence. The offenders, then, were best classified as hebephiles, persons sexually attracted to pubescent adolescents. ²⁰ Hebephilia occupies, for those who acknowledge it as a distinct desire, an uncomfortable space between pedophilia (attraction to prepubescent children under the age of twelve) and ephebophilia (attraction to post-pubescent adolescents between 15 and 19 years old). While the hebephile’s desire for sex with adolescents sometimes became, in moral panics of the late twentieth century, equated with the pedophile’s desire for sex with prepubescent children, it might also be associated with the ephebophile’s less taboo attraction to post-pubescent adolescents. Adult ephebophiles who break the law and engage in sexual relations with mid-adolescents incur widespread condemnation and outrage, yet their desire is, unlike sexual desire for a prepubescent child, acknowledged (often humorously) as widespread and cultivated (often controversially) by popular culture. ²¹ Indeed, ephebophilia has not been listed as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a recognition, perhaps, of the notion that desire for post-pubescent adolescents is not pathological.

The fact that these men were seeking young adolescents rather than prepubescent children, then, widened the possibility for viewers, particularly male viewers, to identify with them. Other kinds of sexual fantasies whose actualization would break the law are common in men. The results of one anonymous self-reporting survey of college-aged men showed that 95% of them had experienced sexual fantasies about committing illegal acts that included sexual assault (68%), sadism (62%), and exhibitionism (39%). ²² Thus, a substantial portion of To Catch a Predator’s audience are likely to identify with the particular desires of the show’s “predators” or with comparably taboo desires, distinguishing themselves from the men on screen on the basis of a lack of control over their impulses to commit illegal sex acts rather than the experience of having those impulses.

Moreover, research has shown that reality television audiences like to identify with the characters on screen. ²³ And while this research shows that many viewers probably derive pleasure in the humiliation of reality TV characters ²⁴ and that viewers tend to identify more with characters that they say they like rather than dislike, ²⁵ some tune in specifically “to see people face challenging situations” (63%) and “imagine how I would perform in similar situations’’ (42%). ²⁶

The inference we make here from the data available – that a substantial part of the viewing audience has had fantasies about engaging in illegal sexual activity and can thus identify with the desires of the men who travel to the sting house – undergirds our argument that the show operates as a kind of relief from the demands of liberal subjectivity. As crime spectators, audience members are invited to indulge vicariously in both the thrills of overthrowing their internal censors and descending into a more authentic, animalistic state. As penal spectators, they are invited to indulge vicariously in the humiliation that exposure of their fantasies to the world would bring, a humiliation that is simultaneously horrifying in its reputation-killing consequences and liberating in its release of the subject from the exhausting efforts to maintain a respectable reputation. We now turn to the structure of the show to demonstrate how this identification and relief is made possible.

IV. Structured Thrills

The stories on To Catch a Predator follow a formulaic sequence that takes the viewer along multiple phenomenological stages of committing a crime and enduring the punishment.

V. The Rules of Engagement

As we have argued, To Catch a Predator was partly an expression of the ideological shifts in criminal justice policy since the 1970s. The program’s pseudo-educational mission reflected long-term efforts by the state to shift responsibility for crime prevention onto citizens. Audiences were asked to fortify their homes and expand their surveillance of children. Criminals, the show reinforced, were moral others against whom responsible citizens must take steps to protect themselves. But, as we’ve also argued, these trappings of the show veiled a possible flip-side of its appeal: providing viewers with opportunities for the vicarious enjoyment of illicit thrill-seeking. ³⁵

All of this was made possible by the show’s tacit construction of rules of engagement, which, like the design of a roller coaster, ensured that vicarious thrills that might occur for the viewer occurred at a safe distance from the actual catastrophe that befalls the on-screen deviant. Those rules, in essence, embody liberalism’s bargain: you can’t commit illegal acts, but you can imagine yourself committing them. Harsh punishment is only doled out to those who move from fantasizing illegal desires to taking clear steps to actualize them. Indeed, much of the potential excitement produced by To Catch a Predator involves the movement of the men across literal boundaries: from home to car, car to sting house, sting house to police cruiser. As he moves across these physical thresholds, his movement across metaphysical ones becomes clear, chosen, and understandable: from fantasy to activity, eagerness to shame, hopefulness to despair, law-abiding citizen to folk devil. The anticipation of making the choice provides the rush that accompanies the movement from inaction to action. The rush does not exist without the action. The pain – or, for some of the show’s masochistic suspects – painful relief that comes from having been caught and punished likewise presupposes a decision to expose one’s self to sanction, to manifest an internal, illicit desire in concrete terms. Viewers at home, we know, harbor illicit sexual fantasies, but they do not make the choices that the men on their screens did to cross the threshold between fantasy and action. As a result, they are given the opportunity to indulge the experience of threshold crossing without suffering the consequences.

Indeed, the show went to great lengths to render these thresholds spatially. Each episode of the program provided extensive detail to viewers about how NBC had transformed the sting house into a rigorously surveilled fortress. Through on-screen maps identifying the placement of cameras within and surrounding the home and shots of Perverted Justice volunteers monitoring surveillance images in a makeshift control room, the show called attention to its staginess. Its narrative structure, moreover, reflected and reinforced a kind of shadow legality that offered at least a semblance of recognition of liberalism’s bargain. Hansen only confronts men after they’ve entered the house. And while his interrogations violate all sorts of due process protections, the ratings-driven need to prolong and capture the subject’s humiliation prompts the television host to give his interview subject the right to make an impromptu defense, one that is ridiculed, to be sure, but a defense all the same. Hansen is also intent on establishing, for audiences, mens rea. The decoy nearly always asks the suspects to bring condoms or other sexually-oriented materials to further establish, beyond their presence in the house, their intent to break the law. These practices created a set of expectations – and unspoken limits – about how, when, and to what end ostentatious punishment would be used. As we will see, these expectations ultimately became a liability for the show, revealing the degree to which popular culture structures and limits the range of humiliating punishment – even as it transforms it into spectacle.

VI. Punitive Burnout

To Catch a Predator aired its last original episode in 2007. NBC’s decision to stop making the series seemed, to many observers at the time, a response to the backlash it suffered when one of the show’s suspects, Louis William Conradt, Jr., chief felony assistant district attorney for Rockwall County, Texas (and a former district attorney of Kaufman County, Texas), committed suicide when police tried to apprehend him in his home. Although Conradt engaged in sexually-explicit conversations with Perverted Justice decoys, he never actually drove to the show’s sting house in nearby Murphy, Texas. Normally, when men do not show up at the house, they are not pursued by Dateline. Because of his elite law enforcement pedigree, however, Conradt proved an irresistible target, and Dateline followed authorities to Conradt’s house and waited nearby with cameras as police surrounded the home. When Conradt did not respond to knocks on his door, the authorities forcibly entered the home. There, they encountered him with a gun. He assured them he was not going to hurt them before fatally shooting himself in the head. ³⁶

Conradt’s sister Patricia sued NBC, alleging, among other things, that the show was acting under the color of law enforcement and violated his Constitutional rights. In the complaint – and the federal district court’s opinion denying NBC’s motion to dismiss it – the show’s own internal rules figured centrally in the translation of the injury that was done to Conradt into a legally cognizable claim against NBC.

The complaint dwells on the artifice of the sting house in Murphy, noting that it was turned into a soundstage on which deviance would make itself known. In the week before the arrests occurred, Dateline workers covered the home with Halloween décor, even though the holiday had recently passed, and “worked on streetlights and ran cable” outside of the home. ³⁷ The men who traveled to the house, the complaint suggests, were walking into a literalized version of the fantasy they had co-created with the decoys in online chats. In contrast, the interior of Conradt’s house, where he was confronted by authorities and killed himself, is a metonym for an authentic, private, and internal self that Conradt never chose to leave. Indeed, the complaint tacitly invoked the structure of the show; unlike his predecessors, Conradt had not chosen to leave the inchoate realm of private thought and fantasy behind. He had not selected from a sea of contradictory self-images an as-yet unrealized, deviant version of himself that he intended to make real. Acting under the color of the law, Dateline had instead forced its way into Conradt’s mind. Members of the SWAT team, the complaint alleged, “forced open a locked glass sliding door at the rear of the house and entered … [T]he door led into a room where BILL was accustomed to work on his computer. Two feet away from the computer lay a workbook from a district-attorneys [sic] conference that BILL had attended back in June. The title was ‘Investigation and Prosecution of Child Sexual Abuse.’” ³⁸ If we imagine the police stepping into the disassembled, private contours of Conradt’s mind, we find, in the complaint’s description, evidence of both fleeting activity and built-in character. It is unclear what the detail of the workbook is supposed to suggest: Conradt’s panicked state of mind as he scrambled to learn the extent of the trouble he’d inadvertently gotten himself into while fantasizing on the computer? A hint that he was, perhaps, engaged in his own investigation of child abuse and that his communications with the decoy were tragically misunderstood? The meaning of the workbook is unclear, though its position just inside the sliding glass door suggests the degree to which it had become the element of his identity most visible to the outside world in his last hours.

The events in the house transpire on a spatially meaningful terrain. As the police step further into the house, the complaint reveals that they walk into a room, less visible to the external world, filled with totems of a humble and virtuous self. “[O]nce the police were inside,” the complaint narrates, “they stepped through a doorway that was adjacent to a collection of Abraham Lincoln artifacts – wood from his house and office and cloth from his coffin.” ³⁹ The Lincoln memorabilia signifies the authentic Conradt, the man who, “from the earliest days … had chosen a good name rather than great riches; it was the jewel of his soul.” He was, the complaint avers, a “nice, quiet, soft-spoken, hard-working, methodical, thorough and intelligent individual. It was characteristic of him to part from a friend with the words, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’” ⁴⁰ This, the complaint suggests, was the essence of Conradt, and the police intrusion represents an unwarranted trespass of his private, core self.

Beyond simply establishing the tort claim that Conradt’s character constituted a valuable form of property, the description of Conradt as a Lincoln-phile sets up the violence that follows. The police had driven Conradt away from this room toward the back of his house. He faces the police, who now lay claim to his identity, hailing him as a deviant subject: “At the end of the hallway, stood BILL. He stepped back into a room and said, ‘I’m not going to hurt anyone.’ Whereupon BILL picked up his handgun and shot himself.” ⁴¹ In this context, Conradt’s act of stepping into a room off the end of the hallway, interrupting their gaze, is a refusal of the identity of the predator that his forced removal from the house would fix upon him indelibly. James Gilligan writes that violence against the self or others is often the dramatic rejection of an overwhelming feeling of being ashamed. ⁴² Shame, Gilligan reminds us, is generated and sustained by the sense of being looked at and recognized as a being with little or no value. Violence results when one lacks, in the moment, the psychological or environmental resources to diminish the feeling of shame. The physiological instinct of self-preservation simply “does not hold when one approaches the point of being so overwhelmed by shame that one can only preserve one’s self (as a psychological entity) by sacrificing one’s body (or those of others).” ⁴³ The sacrifice of the body recuperates the pride and purges the shame. In his final moments, then, Conradt moves away from the shaming gaze of the police, who, standing next to artifacts, have threatened to seize the “jewel of his soul.” He steps into one of the last unseen spaces of his psyche, one that was in imminent danger of being taken away from him if he hadn’t acted so quickly, and freezes forever, in the act of suicide, an unprosecuted, if ambiguous, vision of himself.

Trespass becomes, in the complaint, the legal and emotional violation that made Dateline’s actions so reprehensible. When Conradt kept refusing to take the bait, to travel to the sting house in Murphy, the complaint alleged, Chris Hansen decided to invert the show’s normal logic: “If he won’t come for us, we’ll go to him,” Hansen said to the police, according to the complaint. ⁴⁴ The complaint makes explicit the sexual sadism that the show offers viewers, imagining the men seeking sex with adolescents as unwilling actors in a pornographic production: “[S]ting targets are encouraged into non-volitional acts of humiliation, such as accelerated removal of their clothes, in order to sensationalize and enhance the entertainment value of the confrontation and exposure.” ⁴⁵ But rather than seduce Conradt, as it does the other suspects, into embodying their fantasies, NBC intrudes into the private space (his mind, his home) that ought to be a safe haven for the deviance that lies within everyone and exposes that deviance, forcibly, to the world. The show’s tactics, in other words, shifted in this instance from the psychological seduction of an offender to a violent metaphysical rape of him. Dateline took from Conradt his choice to translate – or not – his fantasies into actions. He became, unwillingly, the very deviant subject that he had, by staying in his home, resisted becoming. Suicide – willing himself into nonexistence – became the only way left to resist the transformation.

The complaint interestingly applies this kind of subject-object logic to his sister Patricia, the plaintiff of the suit. It notes that the home in which Conradt died was the house in which she grew up, and that as the executrix of the estate she holds property in the “memory of Bill” – memories presumably forged in that home – that NBC had blackened. NBC trapped her in its “public broadcasting of depictions of this home,” the complaint argues:

As a result of the defendant’s manipulation of the police, PATRICIA has lost control over the “face” that she puts on and consequently over her self-identity. She has suffered humiliation beneath the gaze of those whose curiosity takes its cue from the defendant. Though the defendant has been a master voyeur, acting from avarice, and the public has been merely a reflex voyeur – in either case, PATRICIA has become a mere object. ⁴⁶

The complaint captures, in its description of Patricia’s injury, NBC’s violation of the punitive rules it established. Rather than punishing persons for the face that they “put on” in and through the act of exiting their homes and entering the bait home, NBC began forcing subjects with the same standing as some viewers (i.e., those with unacted-upon fantasies about engaging in illegal sexual behavior) and, by kinship extension, those related to them, to put on the “face” of the child molester. The show’s gravest injury, in other words, lay in its refusal to recognize the liberal subject as the only legitimate mediator between his thoughts and his being.

In his denial of NBC’s motion to dismiss, federal Judge Denny Chin implicitly connected the complaint’s notions of “face” and the control one has over it to his conclusion that a reasonable jury could find that NBC had violated Conradt’s fourteenth amendment rights. Representatives of the broader public could, Chin argued, read Conradt sympathetically and determine that

what happened here was neither news nor law enforcement, but a blurring of the two with a tragic consequence – to avoid public humiliation, an otherwise law-abiding man was shamed into committing suicide, before he had been charged by any court, before he had an opportunity to be heard. ⁴⁷

Indeed, Chin imagines aloud the Texas prosecutor’s final moments:

That afternoon, at home, [Conradt] likely looked out the window and saw police officers and police vehicles, reporters and news trucks, camera men and television cameras – all waiting for his arrest … Under these circumstances, it is entirely plausible that Conradt … envisioned being brought out of the house, hands handcuffed behind his back, escorted by armed police officers, with television cameras rolling, and his career and life in ruins. ⁴⁸

Key to the moral outrage underlying Chin’s description of Conradt’s last moments is the show’s denial of Conradt’s titular control over his self-image. Unlike the other men on the show, Conradt had not signaled, by exiting the home and going to Murphy, his willingness to risk being interpellated as a man seeking sex with a minor. He had not prepared for the possibility of a sudden, forced transformation of himself into ruins. And he did not get the “opportunity to be heard” that the show’s traditional inquisitorial interrogation nominally offers those that it detains. The punishment, in essence, preceded the establishment of mens rea, perverting the already dubious legality with which the show operated in the first place.

Chin, here, responds to the invitation made by the complaint and, as we have argued, the aesthetics of the show, to imagine himself as the potential “predator” and, more importantly, to weigh the probability that a “reasonable” jury would be able to occupy a similarly empathetic position. In finding that it would, and in temporarily occupying it himself, Chin reveals the limits of neoliberalism and “law and order” punitivism.

VII. Fallout

Newspapers followed the lawsuit and reported in detail the lawsuit’s allegation that the network should have foreseen the suicide. Dateline immediately went on the defensive, distancing itself from the suicide. The New York Times quoted the complaint’s assertion that NBC

wore the robe of a state official and Bill wore the shackles of a detainee. Having trespassed and invaded upon Bill’s property to broadcast a spectacle to millions, the defendant took no more steps toward protecting him than are received by a gladiator or bull. ⁴⁹

In response, a spokesperson for NBC told The New York Times that the police investigation and Dateline’s reporting operation were separate entities and that Conradt likely never even knew that the cameras were nearby. ⁵⁰ But news coverage of the suicide voiced many critical views of Dateline. Conradt’s sister told Murphy City Council members, who had not been informed ahead of time of the sting operation by the town’s manager, that law enforcement had acted as “a judge, jury and executioner that was encouraged by an out-of-control reality show.” ⁵¹ In the reporting that followed the suicide, multiple news outlets reported that a police officer involved in the apprehension said to a Dateline producer, after Conradt had shot himself, “that’ll make good TV.” ⁵² The officer’s remark was linked to arguments against Dateline that criticized both the newsmagazine’s appropriation of police powers and the police’s internalization of an entertainment imperative.

Indeed, the incident prompted reporting that was distinctly critical of the vigilante ethos popularized by “law and order” punitivism and modernized by neoliberalism. “I have a real problem with any citizen’s group conducting any investigation into any crime . . . It’s a mistake for law enforcement to abdicate its responsibility to citizens” the spokesperson for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a Department of Justice program, told a reporter. ⁵³ Following Conradt’s suicide, the District Attorney in Collin County, where Dateline had set up the sting house, refused to press charges against the dozens of men who had been arrested in the traditional sting operation. Explaining why, John Roach pointed to the perils of evidence gathered by untrained vigilante groups or the news media: “The fact that somebody besides police officers were involved is what makes this case bad,” said Roach, who was informed of the sting in advance but did not participate. “If professionals had been running the show, they would have done a much better job rather than being at the beck and call of outsiders.” ⁵⁴ ABC’s rival newsmagazine 20/20 produced a critical story about Dateline’s activity in Murphy and called attention to the multiple points where the line between law enforcement and reporting was blurred, from Dateline’s equipping police officers with cameras to better capture the takedown of suspects to footage of Hansen making suggestions to police about what they ought to do. District Attorney Roach told 20/20 that the police ambush of suspects was a particularly reckless decision on the part of law enforcement, a “needlessly dramatic and potentially dangerous step … Most professionals don’t do that sort of thing. It’s the kind of thing that’s done for performance. It has nothing to do with making the arrest.” The 20/20 segment included interviews with two detectives who quit the force in disgust after the suicide. ⁵⁵

In the news media, criticism of the show occasioned a new kind of spectacle of social control ⁵⁶ : it revived a heroic vision of what Steven A. Kohm calls a “liberal-legal model of American law,” which emphasizes “the primacy of atomistic individual rights and due process.” ⁵⁷ In his interview with 20/20, Roach defended his decision to drop the charges because he could not verify that the evidence provided to him had been collected according to professional standards. He acknowledged that “people who prey on children are people we would like to put in our penitentiary,” but he argued that a larger respect for due process trumped that desire: “Just because we hate what these guys do doesn’t mean I get to break the rules,” he said. “The rules [dictate that] if the evidence can’t get this fellow convicted then I can’t bring a case against him.” He pointed to the suspects’ Miranda rights: Hansen, an untrained interrogator acting as “an agent of the police,” ought to have given the men Miranda warnings. Implied here is a respect for the rights of criminal suspects, whose misdeeds should not preclude them from fair treatment. Indeed, the whole construction of suspects as predators earned condemnation in the aftermath of Conradt’s suicide. The two officers who resigned their posts said that they did so, in part, because Conradt’s death had been “shrugged” off by their colleagues in the police department. He was, “in their opinion a child molester or pervert, if you will. It didn’t matter that the person died … [the suicide] was just pushed aside or shoved under the rug,’’ one said before distancing himself from that position: “I’m ashamed to have been a part of that.” ⁵⁸

This vision of law and of the criminal defendant was subversive in a historical moment in which neoliberalism and “law and order” punitivism were flourishing. In a state famous for harsh punishments, District Attorney Roach was honored, the following year, by the Texas District and County Attorneys Association for refusing to prosecute those captured by police in Murphy during the sting operation. Named Lone Star Prosecutor of the Year, Roach was literally applauded for refusing to pursue child sex offenders – a stunning honor, given the successful prosecution of those apprehended in the numerous other states where Dateline had conducted its operation. ⁵⁹

It is important, however, to put this momentary subversion of contemporary punitivism in perspective. While liberal legalism – with its emphasis on procedural justice and its limits on the discretionary powers of law enforcement agencies – appears less punitive than the humiliating extravagancies of To Catch a Predator, it is no panacea to the crisis of over-punishment. It has materially enabled, with much less fanfare, the rise in mass incarceration and other forms of punitive state violence in America. Punitiveness, Naomi Murakawa has argued, has thrived on liberal optimism about government as much as reactionary skepticism of it. The contemporary carceral state had its origins in the Cold War liberalism that dominated federal policymaking in the aftermath of World War II and its faith in the capacity of government to secure citizens’ personal security through the implementation of procedural reforms and professional standards in law enforcement. As the carceral state’s capacity to punish expanded, Murakawa notes, a de facto logic emerged that “permitted limitless violence so long as it conformed to clearly defined laws, administrative protocol, and due process.” ⁶⁰ Nevertheless, the backlash generated by NBC’s overreach in the Conradt case reveals limits of law and order punitivism and anxiety about liberal subjectivity in a most unlikely and unexpected place.

VIII. Conclusion

Four months after Judge Chin denied NBC’s motion to dismiss the complaint, the network settled the matter with the family and announced that Dateline had no immediate plans to produce new episodes of To Catch a Predator. ⁶¹ Why did the Conradt suicide provide such a turning point for the fortunes of the show? A number of explanations are plausible. The financial liabilities of the operation may have become too much to bear for the network, particularly in light of its settlement with Conradt’s family. The larger historical timing of his death was also likely influential. The financial crisis of 2008 would provide a new villain – the Ponzi schemer or reckless mortgage lender – to pillory. ⁶²

But we want to suggest that the Murphy episode revealed the existence and importance of prurient popular culture’s unarticulated rules and the tacit safeguards they create for its consumers. In light of the rise and fall of To Catch a Predator, we might re-think what it means to understand popular culture as a mechanism for safely satisfying our more taboo desires to inflict, experience, or witness the infliction of pain, the destruction of an ego, or the loss of control. The spectacle of To Catch a Predator – and its spectacular demise – demonstrated how popular culture can operate as a mechanism for taming the anti-modern desires unleashed by “law and order” punitivism. As men who move in a choreographed fashion onto a soundstage endure humiliation, viewers can gain a kind of reassurance that punitive forces are contained in narratives one must choose to enter.

The Murphy episode inverted that reassuring structure. By forcing itself into the world of Internet fantasy (the suspect’s house), rather than awaiting the suspect’s willing and thrilling entrance into the world beyond fantasy, Dateline violated its own unspoken rules. Conradt’s suicide deprived its audience of the illicit, vicarious thrills that it normally cultivates, replacing them with the specter of unregulated, unpredictable, and unearned punishment. This time, it was Dateline violating boundaries and crossing thresholds. And in so doing, Dateline called our attention to the lawlessness underlying punitive sentiments, their impatience, their desperation to produce punitive thrills in any way possible, rather than in any way plausible. The result was a moment of punitive burn-out, when the desire to punish became so overwrought that it extinguished itself. In this important sense, the demise of To Catch a Predator revealed just how susceptible to subversion the ideology of “law and order” punitivism can be.

Crimesploitation is certainly alive and well since the demise of To Catch a Predator – that show’s disastrous structural violation did not spell the end for the genre. The Spike network continues to air new episodes of Cops, perhaps the grandfather of crime-related reality shows (it has been on TV continually since 1988). History (formerly The History Channel) continues to air new episodes of Gangland. MSNBC, which spawned To Catch a Predator, continues to air new episodes of Lockup. All of these shows involve potential seduction in ways similar to To Catch a Predator. They remain popular because they have not strayed too far from the unarticulated foundation of the crimesploitation genre, those tacit rules that structure and limit the infliction of pain in order to provide audiences with opportunities to escape from, as well as recommit to, bearing the burdens of liberal subjectivity.