Queer Criminology

Queer criminology is an emerging field within critical criminology that examines how sexual orientation and gender identity shape experiences of victimization, offending, and criminal justice processing, while challenging the heteronormative assumptions that have historically pervaded criminological theory and research. Established as a formal area of inquiry within Criminology Theories primarily through the work of Carrie Buist, Emily Lenning, Matthew Ball, and the contributors to foundational volumes such as Queer Criminology (Buist & Lenning, 2016) and Queer/ing Criminology (Dwyer, Ball, & Crofts, 2016), queer criminology centers the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals in the study of crime and justice — populations that mainstream criminology has largely ignored, pathologized, or treated as objects of “sexual deviance” research rather than as subjects with distinctive experiences of victimization, criminalization, and institutional harm. This article traces the emergence of queer criminology from the history of LGBTQ+ criminalization, examines its core theoretical concepts and relationship to queer theory, surveys the empirical evidence on LGBTQ+ victimization and criminal justice involvement, and assesses the field’s criticisms, contributions, and future directions.

Outline

I. Introduction

II. The Historical Criminalization of Queerness

• a. Sodomy Laws and the Colonial Legacy
• b. Policing LGBTQ+ Communities in the Twentieth Century
• c. Decriminalization and Its Limits

III. Theoretical Foundations

• a. Queer Theory and Criminology
• b. Heteronormativity and the Construction of Deviance
• c. Intersectionality and Queer Criminology

IV. LGBTQ+ Victimization

• a. Hate Crimes and Bias-Motivated Violence
• b. Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ+ Relationships
• c. Victimization of Transgender Individuals

V. LGBTQ+ Offending and Pathways to Crime

• a. The Disproportionate Incarceration of LGBTQ+ People
• b. Pathways: Abuse, Homelessness, and Survival Crime
• c. The Criminalization of Sex Work and HIV

VI. LGBTQ+ Experiences in the Criminal Justice System

• a. Policing and Police-Community Relations
• b. Courts, Sentencing, and Legal Representation
• c. Incarceration: Vulnerability, Classification, and PREA

VII. Applying Criminological Theory to LGBTQ+ Experiences

• a. Strain Theory and Minority Stress
• b. Social Bond Theory and Queer Communities
• c. Labeling Theory and the Criminalization of Identity

VIII. Criticisms and Debates

• a. Definitional Challenges: What Is “Queer”?
• b. The Homonormativity Critique
• c. Methodological Limitations

IX. Policy Implications

• a. Reforming Hate Crime Legislation and Enforcement
• b. Addressing LGBTQ+ Vulnerability in Corrections
• c. Beyond the Criminal Justice System

X. Conclusion

XI. References

Introduction

Why has mainstream criminology historically ignored the experiences of LGBTQ+ people? How have criminal justice systems participated in the oppression of sexual and gender minorities through the criminalization of same-sex intimacy, the profiling of LGBTQ+ communities, and the victimization of queer and transgender individuals within correctional institutions? And how can criminological theory be reformulated to account for the distinctive experiences of populations whose sexual orientation and gender identity shape their encounters with crime, victimization, and justice?

Queer criminology addresses these questions by arguing that criminology is incomplete without a thorough recognition and understanding of LGBTQ+ experiences (Buist & Lenning, 2016). The field emerged from the recognition that mainstream criminology had either ignored LGBTQ+ populations entirely or approached them through the lens of sexual deviance — treating homosexuality and gender nonconformity as pathological conditions to be explained rather than as social identities whose bearers face distinctive patterns of victimization, criminalization, and institutional mistreatment. This erasure reflected the heteronormative assumptions embedded in criminological theory: assumptions that offenders and victims are heterosexual and cisgender, that families and intimate relationships conform to heterosexual models, and that the criminal justice system operates neutrally with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity.

Queer criminology within Criminology Theories seeks to move LGBTQ+ issues from the margins to the center of criminological research by documenting the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people in the criminal justice system, applying and adapting existing criminological theories to account for these experiences, and developing new theoretical frameworks that illuminate the relationship between sexuality, gender identity, power, and criminal justice. The field has grown rapidly since its formal emergence in the 2010s and has become an increasingly recognized area of critical criminological scholarship.

The Historical Criminalization of Queerness

Sodomy Laws and the Colonial Legacy

The criminalization of same-sex intimacy has deep historical roots. Sodomy laws — statutes criminalizing consensual sexual acts between individuals of the same sex — existed in English common law from at least the sixteenth century and were imported into the British colonies, including the American colonies, where they became part of the colonial legal code. By the time of American independence, every state had enacted some form of sodomy prohibition, with penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment to, in some colonial statutes, death (Eskridge, 2008).

These laws reflected the dominant religious and moral framework of their time, in which same-sex intimacy was regarded as a sin against nature and a violation of divine law. The medicalization of homosexuality in the nineteenth century added a scientific veneer to this moral condemnation: same-sex desire was reclassified from a sin to a disease — a psychological disorder requiring treatment rather than a criminal act deserving punishment. However, the criminal law continued to treat same-sex conduct as a prosecutable offense, and the medical classification of homosexuality as mental illness was used to justify forced treatment, institutionalization, and other coercive interventions that compounded the harm of criminal prosecution.

The colonial legacy of sodomy laws extended far beyond the United States. British colonial administrators imposed sodomy prohibitions across their territories in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean — prohibitions that remain in force in many former colonies to this day. The global reach of LGBTQ+ criminalization illustrates the intersection of imperialism, religious morality, and criminal law that queer criminology seeks to analyze and challenge.

Policing LGBTQ+ Communities in the Twentieth Century

Throughout the twentieth century, LGBTQ+ communities in the United States and other countries were subjected to aggressive and often violent policing. Police raids on bars, bathhouses, and other spaces where LGBTQ+ individuals gathered were routine in many American cities, with patrons arrested for offenses such as disorderly conduct, vagrancy, lewd behavior, and public indecency — charges that were selectively applied to criminalize LGBTQ+ socialization. Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock (2011) documented how police profiling of LGBTQ+ people — particularly LGBTQ+ people of color — resulted in disproportionate stops, searches, arrests, and uses of force that reflected institutional homophobia and transphobia within law enforcement agencies.

The Stonewall uprising of 1969 — in which patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resisted a police raid — is widely regarded as the catalytic event that launched the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The uprising was not an isolated incident but the culmination of decades of police harassment, community resilience, and growing political consciousness. It demonstrated that the criminalization of LGBTQ+ identity and the policing of LGBTQ+ spaces were not merely incidental features of the criminal justice system but central mechanisms through which heteronormative social order was maintained and enforced.

The Stonewall uprising also illustrated the intersectional character of LGBTQ+ criminalization. The patrons who resisted the raid were disproportionately people of color, transgender individuals, and working-class LGBTQ+ people — populations that experienced the most intensive policing and the fewest protections from discrimination. This intersectional reality — in which sexual orientation, gender identity, race, class, and other dimensions of inequality interact to produce compound disadvantage — would become a central analytical theme in queer criminology.

Decriminalization and Its Limits

The legal landscape of LGBTQ+ criminalization has changed dramatically since the mid-twentieth century. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) struck down the remaining state sodomy laws as unconstitutional. The legalization of same-sex marriage through Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) represented a further milestone in the decriminalization and normalization of LGBTQ+ identity.

However, queer criminologists argue that formal decriminalization has not eliminated the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people in practice. Transgender individuals continue to be arrested for offenses related to their gender presentation — including “prostitution by loitering” statutes that target transgender women, particularly transgender women of color, for profiling and arrest based on appearance rather than conduct (Mogul et al., 2011). LGBTQ+ youth continue to be disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system, where gender nonconformity is often punished as behavioral deviance. And the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in many jurisdictions disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men, treating a public health issue as a criminal matter.

The gap between formal legal equality and lived experience is a central concern of queer criminology. Legal reforms have removed the most explicit forms of LGBTQ+ criminalization, but the institutional culture of the criminal justice system — its heteronormative assumptions, its gendered classification systems, its tolerance of homophobic and transphobic violence within correctional institutions — continues to produce outcomes that disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ individuals.

Theoretical Foundations

Queer Theory and Criminology

Queer criminology draws its theoretical foundations from queer theory — an interdisciplinary intellectual tradition that challenges the assumption that sexual orientation and gender identity are natural, fixed, and binary categories. Queer theory, associated with scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michel Foucault, argues that sexual and gender categories are socially constructed — produced through cultural practices, institutional arrangements, and systems of knowledge that define certain identities as normal and others as deviant.

Butler’s (1990) concept of gender performativity — the idea that gender is not an innate property of individuals but a set of performances that are continually enacted and enforced through social norms — has been particularly influential in queer criminology. If gender is performative rather than essential, then the criminal justice system’s insistence on classifying individuals into rigid male/female categories is not a neutral administrative practice but an exercise of power that marginalizes individuals whose gender performance does not conform to the binary — particularly transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals.

Foucault’s (1978) analysis of sexuality as a domain of power/knowledge — in which scientific discourses about sexuality serve as instruments of social control — provides the theoretical framework for understanding how the criminal justice system has historically participated in the regulation and punishment of non-normative sexualities. The sodomy laws, the medical pathologization of homosexuality, the policing of LGBTQ+ spaces, and the contemporary criminalization of HIV nondisclosure can all be understood as instances of the criminal justice system operating as a mechanism for enforcing sexual normativity.

Heteronormativity and the Construction of Deviance

Heteronormativity — the assumption that heterosexuality is the natural, normal, and preferred form of sexual expression, and that individuals should conform to the gender roles traditionally associated with their assigned sex — is the central concept through which queer criminology analyzes the criminal justice system. Queer criminologists argue that heteronormativity is not merely a cultural bias but a structural feature of criminal justice institutions — embedded in their policies, practices, classification systems, and everyday operations.

The heteronormative assumptions of the criminal justice system produce specific harms for LGBTQ+ individuals. Correctional classification systems that assign inmates to facilities based on biological sex rather than gender identity force transgender women to be housed in men’s facilities, where they face extraordinarily high rates of sexual assault and physical violence. Domestic violence laws and services that assume a heterosexual victim-offender dynamic are poorly adapted to address violence in same-sex relationships. Probation and parole conditions that restrict association or residence may disproportionately affect LGBTQ+ individuals whose social networks and housing options are shaped by their marginalized status.

Queer criminology argues that the construction of deviance itself is a heteronormative process. The categories through which the criminal justice system identifies, classifies, and processes individuals — male/female, victim/offender, normal/deviant — are organized around heteronormative assumptions that render LGBTQ+ experiences invisible or unintelligible. By making these assumptions visible and subjecting them to critical analysis, queer criminology seeks to transform both criminological knowledge and criminal justice practice.

Intersectionality and Queer Criminology

Intersectionality — the analytical framework that examines how multiple dimensions of identity and inequality (race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, immigration status) interact to produce compound patterns of privilege and disadvantage — is a foundational concept in queer criminology. LGBTQ+ experiences of crime and criminal justice are profoundly shaped by race, class, and gender: a white, affluent gay man navigates the criminal justice system very differently from a Black transgender woman living in poverty, and a general analysis of “LGBTQ+ experiences” that ignores these differences risks obscuring the most marginalized members of the community.

Meyer (2015) documented how anti-LGBTQ+ violence is structured by race, class, and gender, finding that LGBTQ+ people of color — and particularly transgender women of color — face the highest rates of violent victimization and the least institutional support. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) has consistently found that transgender women of color constitute a disproportionate share of anti-LGBTQ+ homicide victims — a finding that cannot be explained by sexual orientation alone but that reflects the intersection of transphobia, racism, misogyny, and economic marginalization.

The intersectional approach has important implications for criminological theory. Theories of crime and victimization that treat sexual orientation and gender identity as isolated variables — without examining how they interact with race, class, and other dimensions of inequality — will produce incomplete and potentially misleading accounts of LGBTQ+ experiences. Queer criminology insists that sexual orientation and gender identity must be analyzed within the broader matrix of social inequality rather than in isolation from it.

LGBTQ+ Victimization

Hate Crimes and Bias-Motivated Violence

LGBTQ+ individuals experience disproportionately high rates of hate crime and bias-motivated violence. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Hate Crime Statistics program consistently show that sexual orientation and gender identity are among the most common motivations for hate crimes in the United States, with anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes accounting for approximately 20 percent of all reported hate crimes. Bender and Lauritsen (2021), analyzing data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals experienced violent victimization at rates significantly higher than their heterosexual counterparts — even after controlling for demographic characteristics and neighborhood context.

The underreporting of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes is a persistent concern. Many LGBTQ+ individuals — particularly those who are undocumented, involved in sex work, or living in communities with hostile police-community relations — do not report victimization to law enforcement because they fear secondary victimization, disbelief, or arrest. The NCAVP has documented cases in which LGBTQ+ victims who reported violent attacks to police were themselves arrested, charged, or treated as suspects rather than victims — experiences that reinforce distrust of law enforcement and suppress reporting.

The murder of transgender individuals — particularly transgender women of color — has received increasing public and scholarly attention. The Human Rights Campaign has tracked anti-transgender homicides in the United States since 2013, consistently finding that the majority of victims are Black and Latina transgender women. These killings reflect the intersection of transphobia, racism, misogyny, and economic marginalization that queer criminology’s intersectional framework is designed to analyze.

Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ+ Relationships

Intimate partner violence (IPV) in LGBTQ+ relationships has been documented at rates comparable to or exceeding those in heterosexual relationships, yet LGBTQ+ victims face distinctive barriers to recognition, reporting, and service access. The heteronormative assumptions embedded in domestic violence law, policy, and service provision — which assume a male perpetrator and a female victim — render same-sex IPV invisible and create obstacles for LGBTQ+ victims seeking protection orders, shelter services, and law enforcement intervention.

Research has identified forms of abuse that are specific to LGBTQ+ relationships, including the threat of outing a partner’s sexual orientation or gender identity to family, employers, or immigration authorities; the manipulation of a partner’s gender transition (withholding hormones, controlling access to gender-affirming care); and the exploitation of a partner’s internalized homophobia or transphobia as a mechanism of emotional control (Guadalupe-Diaz, 2019). These forms of abuse are not captured by IPV screening instruments designed for heterosexual relationships and may go unrecognized by service providers who lack training in LGBTQ+ dynamics.

LGBTQ+ survivors of IPV often face the additional burden of community skepticism. The myth that same-sex relationships are inherently egalitarian — and therefore cannot involve power imbalances, coercion, or abuse — can discourage victims from seeking help and prevent community members from recognizing signs of abuse. Queer criminology challenges these myths by documenting the reality of IPV in LGBTQ+ relationships and advocating for services and legal protections that are inclusive of all relationship structures.

Victimization of Transgender Individuals

Transgender individuals face particularly severe patterns of victimization across multiple contexts. Research has documented high rates of physical assault, sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination against transgender people in public spaces, workplaces, schools, and interactions with law enforcement and other institutions. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey — the largest survey of transgender people ever conducted — found that 47 percent of respondents had been sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime, 10 percent had been sexually assaulted in the past year, and 58 percent of those who interacted with police reported mistreatment (James et al., 2016).

Transgender women of color face the most extreme victimization. They are disproportionately targeted for both interpersonal violence and police profiling, and they are disproportionately represented among anti-LGBTQ+ homicide victims. The intersection of transphobia, racism, misogyny, poverty, and involvement in survival economies (including sex work) creates a compound vulnerability that places transgender women of color at the most dangerous intersection of identity and structural inequality.

Buist and Stone (2014) argued that the criminal justice system simultaneously fails transgender people as victims and harms them as suspects and inmates — creating a “dual failure” that reflects the system’s fundamental inability to accommodate gender identities and experiences that do not conform to the binary classification model on which it is built.

LGBTQ+ Offending and Pathways to Crime

The Disproportionate Incarceration of LGBTQ+ People

LGBTQ+ individuals are incarcerated at rates that substantially exceed their representation in the general population. Meyer, Flores, Stemple, Romero, Wilson, and Herman (2017) analyzed data from multiple sources and estimated that LGBTQ+ adults are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of the general population. The Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress (2016) found that approximately 20 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system identify as LGBTQ+ — a proportion far exceeding the estimated 7–10 percent of LGBTQ+ youth in the general population.

This disproportionate incarceration is not explained by higher rates of serious offending among LGBTQ+ populations. Instead, it reflects a constellation of factors that push LGBTQ+ individuals into the criminal justice system: family rejection and homelessness, school pushout and juvenile justice involvement, survival crimes (including sex work and petty theft) necessitated by economic marginalization, the criminalization of HIV status, and the selective policing of LGBTQ+ communities and the spaces they inhabit.

The disproportionate incarceration of LGBTQ+ people intersects with racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system. LGBTQ+ people of color and LGBTQ+ people living in poverty are the most heavily impacted, reflecting the compound effects of heteronormativity, racism, and class inequality on criminal justice contact.

Pathways: Abuse, Homelessness, and Survival Crime

Queer criminologists have identified distinctive pathways through which LGBTQ+ individuals become involved in the criminal justice system — pathways shaped by the rejection, abuse, and marginalization that many LGBTQ+ individuals experience because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Family rejection is a primary driver: LGBTQ+ youth who are rejected by their families because of their identity face dramatically elevated risks of homelessness, and homeless LGBTQ+ youth face elevated risks of survival crimes — sex work, petty theft, drug sales — that bring them into contact with the criminal justice system.

The school-to-prison pipeline operates with particular force on LGBTQ+ youth. Gender-nonconforming youth and LGBTQ+ youth are disproportionately targeted for disciplinary action in schools — including suspension, expulsion, and referral to law enforcement — for behaviors that are tolerated or overlooked when exhibited by their heterosexual and cisgender peers (Burdge, Licona, & Hyemingway, 2014). School pushout increases exposure to delinquent peers, reduces attachment to conventional institutions, and accelerates the pathways to juvenile justice involvement that queer criminology documents.

These pathways illustrate the applicability of feminist pathways theory — which examines how childhood abuse, victimization, and structural disadvantage channel women into criminal justice involvement — to LGBTQ+ populations. The gendered pathways framework, which was originally developed to explain women’s incarceration, has been extended by queer criminologists to encompass the distinctive experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals whose pathways to crime are shaped by identity-based rejection, victimization, and institutional exclusion.

The Criminalization of Sex Work and HIV

The criminalization of sex work disproportionately affects LGBTQ+ individuals — particularly transgender women of color — who are overrepresented in the sex industry due to the economic marginalization that results from employment discrimination, family rejection, and limited access to social services. Anti-prostitution policing frequently targets transgender women for profiling and arrest based on appearance and location rather than evidence of criminal activity — a practice that Mogul et al. (2011) termed “walking while trans.”

The criminalization of HIV nondisclosure — laws that make it a criminal offense to engage in sexual activity without disclosing one’s HIV-positive status — has been criticized by queer criminologists and public health advocates as a form of LGBTQ+ criminalization that disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men. These laws, which exist in approximately 35 states, were enacted during the early years of the AIDS epidemic when HIV was poorly understood and widely feared. Critics argue that they are based on outdated science (given that effective antiretroviral treatment reduces the risk of transmission to near zero), that they discourage HIV testing (because individuals who do not know their status cannot be prosecuted for nondisclosure), and that they stigmatize and criminalize people living with HIV rather than advancing public health goals.

The intersection of sex work criminalization and HIV criminalization creates compound legal vulnerability for LGBTQ+ individuals — particularly transgender women of color — who may face prosecution for sex work, HIV nondisclosure, or both. Queer criminology argues that these forms of criminalization serve no legitimate public safety purpose and that the decriminalization of sex work and the reform of HIV-specific criminal laws are necessary steps toward a criminal justice system that does not target LGBTQ+ people for punishment based on their identity and circumstances.

Table 1. LGBTQ+ Criminal Justice Involvement: Key Data

---

Indicator	Finding	Source
LGBTQ+ adult incarceration rate	3× higher than general population	Meyer et al. (2017)
LGBTQ+ youth in juvenile justice	~20% of incarcerated youth	MAP & CAP (2016)
Transgender lifetime sexual assault	47% of U.S. Transgender Survey respondents	James et al. (2016)
Anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes	~20% of all reported hate crimes	FBI Hate Crime Statistics
LGB violent victimization	Significantly higher than heterosexual rates	Bender & Lauritsen (2021)
Transgender police mistreatment	58% of those who interacted with police	James et al. (2016)

---

LGBTQ+ Experiences in the Criminal Justice System

Policing and Police-Community Relations

The relationship between LGBTQ+ communities and law enforcement has been shaped by the historical legacy of criminalization, profiling, and police violence documented above. Research consistently finds that LGBTQ+ individuals — and particularly transgender individuals and LGBTQ+ people of color — report lower levels of trust in police, higher rates of negative police encounters, and greater reluctance to report victimization compared to heterosexual and cisgender populations. The BreakOUT! (2014) community research report, conducted by and for queer and trans youth of color in New Orleans, documented pervasive experiences of police harassment, profiling, and abuse.

Some police departments have made significant efforts to improve relations with LGBTQ+ communities through the establishment of LGBTQ+ liaison units, the adoption of nondiscrimination policies, the provision of cultural competency training, and the development of protocols for interacting with transgender individuals — including the use of preferred names and pronouns and the avoidance of strip searches conducted by officers of a different gender identity. These reforms represent meaningful steps toward reducing institutional homophobia and transphobia within law enforcement.

However, queer criminologists caution that reforms focused on individual officers’ attitudes and behaviors are insufficient without structural changes to the policies and practices that produce disproportionate policing of LGBTQ+ communities. Anti-prostitution enforcement that targets transgender women, quality-of-life policing that displaces LGBTQ+ homeless youth, and immigration enforcement that threatens undocumented LGBTQ+ individuals are structural practices that cannot be addressed through cultural competency training alone.

Courts, Sentencing, and Legal Representation

LGBTQ+ individuals face distinctive challenges in the court system. Research has documented instances of bias in judicial decision-making, including cases in which judges have imposed harsher sentences on LGBTQ+ defendants, denied custody to LGBTQ+ parents, or failed to recognize LGBTQ+ intimate partner violence as domestic violence eligible for protection orders. The “gay panic” and “trans panic” defenses — in which defendants claim that the discovery of a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity provoked a violent reaction — have been used to mitigate charges in assault and homicide cases, effectively blaming the victim for the violence inflicted upon them.

Legal representation is another area of concern. LGBTQ+ defendants who are represented by court-appointed attorneys may encounter lawyers who are unfamiliar with or hostile to LGBTQ+ issues, who fail to raise relevant defenses (such as bias-motivated prosecution), or who misidentify transgender clients by using incorrect names and pronouns in court documents and proceedings. The lack of LGBTQ+-competent legal representation can result in inadequate defense, unjust convictions, and sentences that do not account for the distinctive circumstances of LGBTQ+ defendants.

Queer criminology advocates for judicial education on LGBTQ+ issues, the prohibition of gay and trans panic defenses (which have been banned in a growing number of states), the development of LGBTQ+-inclusive domestic violence protections, and the training of public defenders and court personnel on the distinctive legal needs of LGBTQ+ clients.

Incarceration: Vulnerability, Classification, and PREA

The experience of incarceration is profoundly shaped by sexual orientation and gender identity. LGBTQ+ inmates face elevated risks of sexual assault, physical violence, and harassment from both fellow inmates and correctional staff. Beck, Berzofsky, Caspar, and Krebs (2013), analyzing data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, found that inmates who reported their sexual orientation as bisexual or homosexual experienced rates of sexual victimization by other inmates that were approximately ten times higher than those reported by heterosexual inmates.

The classification of transgender inmates presents one of the most challenging policy issues in corrections. Most correctional systems assign inmates to facilities based on their sex assigned at birth, which typically results in transgender women being housed in men’s facilities — an environment in which they face extreme vulnerability to sexual assault and physical violence. The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003 requires correctional facilities to assess transgender inmates on a case-by-case basis and to consider the inmate’s own views regarding safety, but compliance has been inconsistent and enforcement limited (Carrillo, 2022).

Solitary confinement is frequently used as a response to the vulnerability of LGBTQ+ inmates — a practice that queer criminologists regard as a form of punishment masquerading as protection. Rather than addressing the institutional conditions that produce violence against LGBTQ+ inmates, solitary confinement isolates the victim, inflicts severe psychological harm, and reinforces the marginalization that characterizes LGBTQ+ experiences throughout the criminal justice system.

Applying Criminological Theory to LGBTQ+ Experiences

Strain Theory and Minority Stress

General strain theory (Agnew, 1992) can be productively applied to LGBTQ+ experiences by incorporating the concept of minority stress — the chronic, socially based stress experienced by members of stigmatized minority groups as a result of prejudice, discrimination, and the anticipation of rejection (Meyer, 2003). LGBTQ+ individuals experience distinctive strains — family rejection, bullying, employment discrimination, housing instability, and the constant negotiation of stigmatized identities — that generate the negative emotions (anger, frustration, depression) that GST identifies as the proximate causes of criminal behavior.

The minority stress framework suggests that the elevated rates of substance use, mental health problems, and criminal justice involvement among LGBTQ+ populations are not products of sexual orientation or gender identity per se but of the social conditions — stigma, discrimination, and institutional exclusion — that surround these identities. This interpretation is consistent with GST’s proposition that strains caused by others, perceived as unjust, and associated with low social control are the most conducive to criminal coping.

Applying GST to LGBTQ+ populations also highlights the importance of conditioning factors. LGBTQ+ individuals who have access to supportive communities, affirming institutions, and strong social networks may be better equipped to cope with minority stress through legal means — while those who lack these resources may be more likely to turn to substance use, survival crime, or other forms of criminal coping.

Social Bond Theory and Queer Communities

Social bond theory (Hirschi, 1969) can be applied to LGBTQ+ experiences by examining how sexual orientation and gender identity affect the formation and maintenance of bonds to conventional society. Family rejection weakens the attachment bond that Hirschi identified as the most important element of social control. School pushout weakens commitment to education. Employment discrimination weakens commitment to legitimate occupational pursuits. And the criminalization of LGBTQ+ identity itself may weaken belief in the moral validity of the legal system — particularly among LGBTQ+ individuals who have experienced the law not as a source of protection but as a mechanism of persecution.

At the same time, LGBTQ+ communities and institutions — including LGBTQ+ community centers, affirming religious congregations, and chosen family networks — can serve as alternative sources of social bonding that restrain criminal behavior. The concept of “chosen family” — the networks of mutual support and care that LGBTQ+ individuals create in the absence of biological family acceptance — may function as an alternative attachment bond that provides the informal social control that biological family rejection has weakened.

The application of social bond theory to LGBTQ+ populations reveals both the theory’s explanatory potential and its limitations. The theory’s heteronormative assumptions — its focus on parental attachment, school bonding, and conventional employment as the primary sources of social control — do not fully account for the distinctive social structures of LGBTQ+ communities. A queer adaptation of social bond theory would need to incorporate non-traditional bonding institutions (chosen families, LGBTQ+ organizations, affirming communities) alongside the conventional ones that Hirschi emphasized.

Labeling Theory and the Criminalization of Identity

Labeling theory (Becker, 1963) provides perhaps the most natural theoretical framework for analyzing LGBTQ+ experiences with crime and criminal justice. The theory’s central proposition — that deviance is not a property of behavior but a label applied by powerful groups to behaviors and identities they seek to control — directly applies to the historical criminalization of homosexuality and gender nonconformity. LGBTQ+ people have not been labeled as deviant because their behavior is inherently harmful but because it violates the heteronormative expectations of the dominant culture.

The labeling process produces the secondary deviance that the theory predicts: individuals who are labeled as deviant — through arrest, prosecution, incarceration, or social stigma — may internalize the deviant identity, be excluded from conventional opportunities, and be pushed toward further deviance as a consequence of the label itself. LGBTQ+ individuals who are arrested for sex work, drug offenses, or other survival crimes may find that the criminal label compounds the stigma of their sexual or gender identity, creating compound barriers to employment, housing, and social integration that increase the probability of further criminal justice involvement.

The labeling perspective also illuminates the role of moral entrepreneurs — individuals and groups who campaign for the creation and enforcement of rules that define specific behaviors or identities as deviant — in the criminalization of LGBTQ+ identity. Anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations, religious leaders, and politicians who have promoted sodomy laws, anti-transgender legislation, and the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people from civil rights protections function as moral entrepreneurs whose efforts to define queerness as deviance have had direct and devastating consequences for LGBTQ+ communities.

Table 2. Criminological Theories Applied to LGBTQ+ Experiences

---

Theory	Application to LGBTQ+ Populations	Key Insight
General strain theory	Minority stress as criminogenic strain; family rejection, discrimination, and stigma generate negative emotions	LGBTQ+ crime is a response to identity-based strains, not identity itself
Social bond theory	Family rejection weakens attachment; school pushout weakens commitment; chosen families as alternative bonds	Both weakened conventional bonds and alternative bonding structures shape LGBTQ+ offending
Labeling theory	Historical criminalization of homosexuality/gender nonconformity as deviance; secondary deviance from criminal labels	Deviance is constructed through heteronormative labeling, not inherent in LGBTQ+ behavior
Feminist pathways	Childhood abuse, victimization, homelessness, and survival crime as gendered pathways	Framework extends from women to LGBTQ+ populations via identity-based rejection and marginalization

---

Criticisms and Debates

Definitional Challenges: What Is “Queer”?

One of the most active debates within queer criminology concerns the meaning and scope of the term “queer” itself. Some scholars use “queer” as an umbrella term for LGBTQ+ identities — a shorthand for the diverse sexual orientations and gender identities that deviate from heterosexual and cisgender norms. Others use “queer” in the more theoretically specific sense derived from queer theory — as a critique of identity categories themselves, a rejection of fixed sexual and gender classifications, and a challenge to the normative frameworks through which identity is constructed and regulated.

This definitional tension has practical implications for the scope and direction of queer criminological research. If queer criminology is defined as the study of LGBTQ+ experiences with crime and criminal justice, its agenda is primarily empirical: documenting victimization rates, incarceration disparities, and institutional mistreatment. If queer criminology is defined as the application of queer theory to criminological analysis — a project of destabilizing the categories (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, victim/offender, normal/deviant) through which the criminal justice system operates — its agenda is more fundamentally theoretical and critical.

Ball (2016) argued that queer criminology should embrace both dimensions — the empirical documentation of LGBTQ+ experiences and the theoretical critique of the normative frameworks that produce those experiences — and that the tension between them is productive rather than problematic. The empirical work provides the evidentiary foundation for the theoretical critique, while the theoretical critique provides the analytical framework for interpreting the empirical findings.

The Homonormativity Critique

A critical debate within queer criminology concerns the risk of homonormativity — the adoption of heteronormative values (monogamy, respectability, assimilation) by mainstream LGBTQ+ politics, resulting in the marginalization of LGBTQ+ individuals who do not conform to these assimilationist norms. Critics argue that the mainstream LGBTQ+ rights movement — with its focus on marriage equality, military service, and hate crime legislation — has prioritized the interests of white, affluent, cisgender gay men and lesbians while neglecting the needs of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community: transgender people, LGBTQ+ people of color, sex workers, homeless youth, and people living with HIV.

The homonormativity critique has implications for queer criminology’s relationship to the criminal justice system. Some queer criminologists advocate for reform within the existing system — improved hate crime enforcement, LGBTQ+-inclusive domestic violence services, better conditions for LGBTQ+ inmates. Others argue that the criminal justice system is itself a mechanism of oppression that cannot be reformed to serve the interests of LGBTQ+ communities and that queer criminology should align itself with abolitionist movements that seek to dismantle the carceral state rather than make it more inclusive.

This debate parallels broader tensions within critical criminology between reformist and abolitionist orientations and reflects the diversity of political perspectives within the queer criminology community. The resolution — if one is possible — likely lies in a both/and approach: pursuing immediate reforms that reduce the harm experienced by LGBTQ+ people within the existing system while simultaneously working toward the structural transformations that would make the carceral system unnecessary.

Methodological Limitations

Queer criminology faces significant methodological challenges. LGBTQ+ populations are difficult to identify and sample using conventional survey methods, and the small sample sizes that result from the relatively low prevalence of LGBTQ+ identity in the general population limit the statistical power of quantitative analyses. Official criminal justice data rarely collect information on sexual orientation or gender identity, making it difficult to analyze LGBTQ+ disparities in arrest, prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration with the same rigor that has been applied to racial and gender disparities.

Self-report measures of sexual orientation and gender identity raise additional challenges. Individuals may be reluctant to disclose LGBTQ+ identity in research settings due to fear of stigma, especially in correctional environments where disclosure may increase vulnerability to violence. The fluidity of sexual orientation and gender identity — which may change over time or vary across contexts — complicates the measurement of these constructs using the fixed categorical measures that quantitative research typically employs.

These methodological limitations have led queer criminologists to rely heavily on qualitative methods — interviews, ethnography, case studies, and community-based participatory research — that can capture the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in ways that large-scale quantitative studies often cannot. While qualitative research has produced rich and detailed accounts of LGBTQ+ experiences with crime and criminal justice, the absence of large-scale quantitative data limits the field’s ability to establish the prevalence and distribution of LGBTQ+ victimization and criminal justice involvement with the precision that policymakers demand.

Policy Implications

Reforming Hate Crime Legislation and Enforcement

Queer criminology supports the strengthening of hate crime legislation to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories in all jurisdictions. The federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 expanded federal hate crime jurisdiction to cover crimes motivated by sexual orientation and gender identity, but enforcement at the state and local levels remains uneven, and many states lack LGBTQ+-inclusive hate crime statutes.

Beyond legislative reform, queer criminology advocates for improved hate crime reporting, training for law enforcement in recognizing and investigating bias-motivated crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals, and the development of victim services that are accessible and affirming for LGBTQ+ survivors. Community-based reporting mechanisms — which allow LGBTQ+ individuals to document hate incidents without involving police — represent an alternative approach for communities where distrust of law enforcement makes formal reporting impractical.

However, some queer criminologists are skeptical of hate crime legislation as a vehicle for LGBTQ+ justice, arguing that enhanced criminal penalties reinforce the punitive orientation of the criminal justice system without addressing the structural conditions (homophobia, transphobia, racism, poverty) that produce anti-LGBTQ+ violence. These critics argue that investment in education, community development, and social services would be more effective than enhanced punishment in reducing violence against LGBTQ+ people.

Addressing LGBTQ+ Vulnerability in Corrections

The extreme vulnerability of LGBTQ+ inmates — particularly transgender inmates — demands urgent policy attention. Queer criminology supports the housing of transgender inmates in facilities consistent with their gender identity, the provision of gender-affirming health care (including hormone therapy) in correctional settings, the prohibition of solitary confinement as a response to LGBTQ+ vulnerability, and the training of correctional staff on LGBTQ+ cultural competency and the prevention of sexual assault.

The full implementation and enforcement of PREA standards — including the case-by-case assessment of transgender inmates and the prohibition of sexual harassment and abuse based on sexual orientation or gender identity — is a minimum requirement. However, PREA compliance has been inconsistent, and queer criminologists argue that the standards themselves are insufficient without fundamental changes to the institutional culture of corrections that tolerates and sometimes encourages homophobic and transphobic violence.

More broadly, queer criminology supports the reduction of incarceration for LGBTQ+ individuals through the expansion of diversion programs, the decriminalization of sex work and HIV nondisclosure, and the development of community-based alternatives to incarceration that are designed to address the distinctive needs of LGBTQ+ populations — including housing support, employment assistance, substance abuse treatment, and mental health services that are affirming of LGBTQ+ identities.

Beyond the Criminal Justice System

The most fundamental policy implication of queer criminology is that the criminal justice system alone cannot address the conditions that produce LGBTQ+ vulnerability to crime and criminal justice involvement. Family rejection, school pushout, employment discrimination, housing instability, and inadequate health care are the structural conditions that channel LGBTQ+ individuals into the criminal justice system — and these conditions require structural solutions that extend far beyond criminal justice reform.

Investment in LGBTQ+ youth services — including affirming out-of-home care, school-based support programs, housing assistance for homeless LGBTQ+ youth, and community centers that provide safe spaces and social services — addresses the upstream conditions that produce criminal justice involvement. Employment nondiscrimination protections, access to gender-affirming health care, and the expansion of social safety net programs to LGBTQ+ individuals and families reduce the economic marginalization that drives survival crime.

Queer criminology argues that the most effective crime prevention strategy for LGBTQ+ populations is not better policing or more inclusive prisons but the creation of a society in which LGBTQ+ individuals have access to the material resources, institutional support, and social acceptance necessary to live safe, dignified, and law-abiding lives — a vision that connects the field to the broader social justice commitments of critical criminology.

Conclusion

Queer criminology has emerged as a vital and rapidly growing field that addresses one of the most significant gaps in criminological knowledge: the experiences of LGBTQ+ people as victims, offenders, and subjects of criminal justice processing. By documenting the disproportionate victimization and incarceration of LGBTQ+ populations, analyzing the heteronormative assumptions embedded in criminological theory and criminal justice practice, and centering the voices and experiences of the most marginalized members of LGBTQ+ communities, queer criminology has expanded the boundaries of the discipline and challenged its foundational assumptions.

The field’s contributions extend beyond the empirical documentation of LGBTQ+ experiences to the theoretical insight that the categories through which criminology understands crime and justice — deviance and normality, victim and offender, male and female — are themselves products of power relations that systematically disadvantage sexual and gender minorities. This insight connects queer criminology to the broader critical tradition and provides a framework for understanding how the criminal justice system participates in the reproduction of inequality along dimensions that mainstream criminology has historically ignored.

The future of queer criminology lies in the continued development of its empirical evidence base — including the collection of large-scale quantitative data on LGBTQ+ criminal justice involvement — the further integration of its insights with existing criminological theories, the expansion of its international and comparative scope, and the translation of its findings into policies and practices that reduce the harm experienced by LGBTQ+ people in and beyond the criminal justice system. As long as sexual orientation and gender identity shape experiences of victimization, criminalization, and justice — and the evidence clearly demonstrates that they do — queer criminology will remain essential for a complete and just criminological understanding.

Related Articles

• Core Concepts of Queer Criminology
• LGBTQ+ Victimization and Criminology
• LGBTQ+ Offending and the Criminal Justice System
• Queer Criminology and Hate Crime
• Queer Criminology and Domestic Violence
• Queer Criminology and Sex Work
• Queer Criminology and Incarceration
• Queer Criminology and Policing
• Queer Criminology and Youth Justice
• Intersectionality in Queer Criminology
• Queer Criminology and Criminal Justice Reform
• Criticisms of Queer Criminology
• Future Directions in Queer Criminology

References

1. Agnew, R. (1992). Foundation for a general strain theory of crime and delinquency. Criminology, 30(1), 47–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1992.tb01093.x
2. Ball, M. (2016). Criminology and queer theory: Dangerous bedfellows? Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137513342
3. Ball, M., Buist, C. L., & Woods, J. B. (2014). Introduction to the special issue on queer/ing criminology: New directions and frameworks. Critical Criminology, 22(1), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-014-9230-4
4. Beck, A. J., Berzofsky, M., Caspar, R., & Krebs, C. (2013). Sexual victimization in prisons and jails reported by inmates, 2011–12 (Report NCJ 241399). Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice.
5. Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press.
6. Bender, A. K., & Lauritsen, J. L. (2021). Violent victimization among lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations in the United States: Findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey, 2017–2018. American Journal of Public Health, 111(2), 318–326. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306017
7. BreakOUT! (2014). We deserve better: A report on policing in New Orleans by and for queer and trans youth of color. BreakOUT!
8. Buist, C. L., & Lenning, E. (2016). Queer criminology. Routledge.
9. Buist, C. L., & Lenning, E. (2023). Queer criminology (2nd ed.). Routledge.
10. Buist, C. L., & Stone, C. (2014). Transgender victims and offenders: Failures of the United States criminal justice system and the necessity of queer criminology. Critical Criminology, 22(1), 35–47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-013-9224-1
11. Burdge, H., Licona, A. C., & Hyemingway, Z. T. (2014). LGBTQ youth of color: Discipline disparities, school push-out, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Gay-Straight Alliance Network.
12. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
13. Carrillo, A. (2022). “PREA is a joke”: A case study of how trans PREA standards are(n’t) enforced. Feminist Criminology, 17(3), 358–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/15570851221082188
14. Dwyer, A., Ball, M., & Crofts, T. (Eds.). (2016). Queering criminology. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137513373
15. Eskridge, W. N. (2008). Dishonorable passions: Sodomy laws in America, 1861–2003. Viking.
16. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1 (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon.
17. Grant, J. M., Mottet, L. A., Tanis, J., Harrison, J., Herman, J. L., & Keisling, M. (2011). Injustice at every turn: A report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. National Center for Transgender Equality.
18. Guadalupe-Diaz, X. L. (2019). Transgressed: Intimate partner violence in transgender lives. New York University Press.
19. Guadalupe-Diaz, X. L., & Jasinski, J. (2017). “I wasn’t a priority, I wasn’t a victim”: Challenges in help seeking for transgender survivors of intimate partner violence. Violence Against Women, 23(6), 772–792. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801216650288
20. Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. University of California Press.
21. Irvine, A. (2010). “We’ve had three of them”: Addressing the invisibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and gender nonconforming youths in the juvenile justice system. Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 19(3), 675–709.
22. James, S. E., Herman, J. L., Rankin, S., Keisling, M., Mottet, L., & Anafi, M. (2016). The report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. National Center for Transgender Equality.
23. Langenderfer-Magruder, L., Whitfield, D. L., Walls, N. E., Kattari, S. K., & Ramos, D. (2016). Experiences of intimate partner violence and subsequent police reporting among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer adults in Colorado. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 31(5), 855–871. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260514556767
24. Meyer, D. (2015). Violence against queer people: Race, class, gender, and the persistence of anti-LGBT discrimination. Rutgers University Press.
25. Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674
26. Meyer, I. H., Flores, A. R., Stemple, L., Romero, A. P., Wilson, B. D. M., & Herman, J. L. (2017). Incarceration rates and traits of sexual minorities in the United States: National Inmate Survey, 2011–2012. American Journal of Public Health, 107(2), 267–273. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303576
27. Mogul, J. L., Ritchie, A. J., & Whitlock, K. (2011). Queer (in)justice: The criminalization of LGBT people in the United States. Beacon Press.
28. Movement Advancement Project & Center for American Progress. (2016). Unjust: How the broken criminal justice system fails LGBT people of color. MAP & CAP.
29. Peterson, D., & Panfil, V. R. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of LGBT communities, crime, and justice. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9188-0
30. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. University of California Press.
31. Spade, D. (2011). Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law. South End Press.
32. Stotzer, R. L. (2009). Violence against transgender people: A review of United States data. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 14(3), 170–179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2009.01.006
33. Stotzer, R. L. (2014). Law enforcement and criminal justice personnel interactions with transgender people in the United States: A literature review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 19(3), 263–277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2014.04.012
34. Sylvia Rivera Law Project. (2007). “It’s war in here”: A report on the treatment of transgender and intersex people in New York State men’s prisons. SRLP.
35. Woods, J. B. (2014). “Queering criminology”: Overview of the state of the field. In D. Peterson & V. R. Panfil (Eds.), Handbook of LGBT communities, crime, and justice (pp. 15–41). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9188-0_2