Looking this good should be a crime.
A Twitter account that posts the charges and photos of women who look criminally attractive in their mugshots has racked up nearly 200,000 followers. And while having a mug featured on the page may seem like a dubious honor, the man behind it says he’s been inundated with wannabe felon fatales begging for him to post their pics.
“A lot of people send me their own mugshots — I get probably 15 to 20 plus [direct messages] a day of different ones,” the creator of Mugshawtys, 24-year-old electrician Josh Jeffery, tells The Post. “A lot of what I post is submissions.”
Women beg him to rep their record, Jeffery says, hoping to get cash and boost their followings by appearing as a Mugshawty.
“They definitely want some kind of exposure,” he says, adding that many Shawtys ask him to shout out their Twitter handle or crowdfunding account, in some cases, to help them raise bail.
Jeffery, who’s based in California, says he personally doesn’t want to profit from the account. He calls websites that charge to take down mugshots “insane” and “the most f–ked-up thing I’ve ever heard.”
If a Mugshawty ever asks for her photo to be taken down, he complies immediately.
“If there’s anybody that doesn’t want their picture on there, I take it down with no questions asked,” he says. But requests for a shout-out or to post a mug are much more frequent than asks for the pics to be removed. And the most frequent request comes in the comments, where men often ask for a Shawty’s social media handle.
“I don’t put information out there if the [women] don’t want it,” Jeffery clarifies.
Still, he receives a lot of backlash from people who don’t like the idea of a social media account dedicated to the promotion of ogling women, or that it celebrates crimes such as DUI, battery or even attempted murder.
“I get random people all the time sayin’, ‘Oh, this isn’t right.’ I can see where they’re coming from,” he says. While the account is a passion project currently making him no money, he says he’s looked into charities that benefit those in the criminal justice system, in case it ever does.
His amassed following makes maintaining the Twitter — and an Instagram page — much easier than it initially was, when he began Mugshawtys in 2016.
“When I first started, I was going through these databases and doing all the work myself, copy and pasting everything,” he says.
In the process of collecting smokin’ hot mugshots, he’s also learned a good deal about American law enforcement.
“Our justice system is a joke,” he says, noting that he often sees women charged with felonies for offenses — frequently in relation to marijuana — which hardly seem criminal to him. And he finds that the US is unique in having such easily accessible mugshots.
“I think the US is the only country where there’s a public mugshot database,” he says. “I’ve posted some international mugshots, too, but every one of those the person sent me.”
Running Mugshawtys has also been a lesson in gender studies for him. Many ask him if he’d start an account for male Mugshawtys, but he thinks that would be more challenging, and commenters wouldn’t be so forgiving of certain crimes on the basis of attractiveness — even though the internet still hasn’t quite recovered from “Hot Felon” Jeremy Meeks, who went on to thrive in a modeling career after his 2014 arrest.
“I feel like girls are looked at differently for a lot of their crimes than a man would be.”