‘Nobody’s better than you, nobody’s worse than you’: Moral community among prisoners convicted of sexual offences

Sex offenders constitute a significant proportion of the prison population – in England and Wales, almost one in six prisoners has been convicted of a sexual offence – and yet they barely feature in sociological studies of prison life. This article is based on research conducted in a medium security English prison which only accommodated sex offenders. It argues that if we are to understand prisoners’ experiences of imprisonment and identity management, it is necessary to explore their horizontal relationships with other prisoners. Prisoners experienced their convictions as an assault on their moral character, resenting attempts to define them as ‘sex offenders’. Following Sykes, we argue that prisoners attempted to form an accepting and equal moral community in order to mitigate the pain of this moral exclusion and to enable the development of a convivial atmosphere. However, these attempts were limited by imprisonment’s structural limitations on trust and prisoners’ imported negative feelings about sex offenders. This suggests that sex offenders may have more complex feelings towards their own moral exclusion than is suggested by their attempts to resist their own stigmatisation. This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/146247451560380

Staff-prisoner relationships, staff professionalism, and the use of authority in public- and private-sector prisons

Prison privatization has generally been associated with developments in neoliberal punishment. However, relatively little is known about the specific impact of privatization on the daily life of prisoners, including areas that are particularly salient not just to debates about neoliberal penality, but the wider reconfiguration of public service provision and frontline work. Drawing on a study of values, practices, and quality of life in five private‐sector and two public‐sector prisons in England and Wales, this article seeks to compare and explain three key domains of prison culture and quality: relationships between frontline staff and prisoners, levels of staff professionalism (or jailcraft), and prisoners' experience of state authority. The study identifies some of the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of the public and private prison sectors, particularly in relation to staff professionalism and its impact on the prisoner experience. These findings have relevance beyond the sphere of prisons and punishment.This is the final version. It was first published by Wiley at onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsi.12093/abstrac

The emotional geography of prison life

Accounts of prison life consistently describe a culture of mutual mistrust, fear, aggression and barely submerged violence. Often too, they explain how prisoners adapt to this environment—in men’s prisons, at least—by putting on emotional ‘masks’ or ‘fronts’ of masculine bravado which hide their vulnerabilities and deter the aggression of their peers. This article does not contest the truth of such descriptions, but argues that they provide a partial account of the prison’s emotional world. Most importantly, for current purposes, they fail to describe the way in which prisons have a distinctive kind of emotional geography, with zones in which certain kinds of emotional feelings and displays are more or less acceptable. In this article, we argue that these ‘emotion zones’, which cannot be characterized either as ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ domains, enable the display of a wider range of feelings than elsewhere in the prison. Their existence represents a challenge to depictions of prisons as environments that are unwaveringly sterile, unfailingly aggressive or emotionally undifferentiated. This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage at http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/18/1/56

Structural capacity assessment of corroded RC bridge piers

A new numerical model is developed that enables simulation of the nonlinear flexural response of reinforced concrete (RC) components and sections with corroded reinforcement. The numerical model employs a displacement based beam-column element using the classical Hermitian shape function. The material nonlinearity is accounted for by updating element stiffness matrices using the moment-curvature response of the element section considering uniform stiffness over the element. The cover concrete strength is adjusted to account for corrosion induced cover cracking and the core confined concrete strength and ductility are adjusted to account for corrosion induced damage to the transverse reinforcement. The numerical model is validated against a bench mark experiment on a corroded RC column subject to lateral cyclic loading. The verified model is then used to explore the impact of corrosion on the inelastic response and the residual capacity of corroded RC sections. The results show that considering the effect of corrosion damage on RC sections changes the failure mode of RC columns

A more representative chamber: representation and the House of Lords

Since 1997 there has been substantive reform of the House of Lords in an effort to make the chamber ‘more democratic and more representative’. Whilst the Labour government failed to press ahead with any of the proposed plans for further reform following the removal of the bulk of the hereditary peers in 1999, it remained committed to the notion that such reform must make the second chamber ‘more representative’. The coalition government's programme advocates a long-term aspiration for a House wholly or mainly elected on the basis of proportional representation, and a short-term approach based on additional appointments to ensure a balance of the parties. What is clear in all of these proposals for reform is a desire for the House of Lords to become more representative than it is at present. However, what is less clear is what is meant by ‘representative’ – who the House of Lords is supposed to represent, and what form representation will take. Moreover, in proposing to make the chamber more representative, either through appointment or election, little attention has been paid to how the current House of Lords provides representation. This article examines these questions in the context of Pitkin's classic conceptions of representation and peers' attitudes towards their own representative rol

Computational Modelling Strategies for Nonlinear Response Prediction of Corroded Circular RC Bridge Piers

A numerical model is presented that enables simulation of the nonlinear flexural response of corroded reinforced concrete (RC) components. The model employs a force-based nonlinear fibre beam-column element. A new phenomenological uniaxial material model for corroded reinforcing steel is used. This model accounts for the impact of corrosion on buckling strength, post-buckling behaviour and low-cycle fatigue degradation of vertical reinforcement under cyclic loading. The basic material model is validated through comparison of simulated and observed response for uncorroded RC columns. The model is used to explore the impact of corrosion on the inelastic response of corroded RC columns

Nonlinear fiber element modeling of RC bridge piers considering inelastic buckling of reinforcement

An advanced modelling technique is developed to model the nonlinear cyclic response of circular RC columns using fibre-based section discretisation method. A comparison between different reinforcing steel models is made. Through a comprehensive parametric study the influence of inelastic buckling of vertical reinforcement on the cyclic response of circular RC columns is investigated. The results have been compared and validated against a set of experimental datasets. The proposed calibrated model accounts for the influence of inelastic buckling of vertical reinforcement and interaction of stiffness of horizontal ties reinforcement with vertical reinforcement. The model also accounts for the fracture of vertical bars due to low-cycle high-amplitude fatigue degradation. Therefore, this model is able to predict the nonlinear cyclic response of circular RC columns up to complete collapse. The results show that the existing uniaxial material models of reinforcing bars that are calibrated using stress-strain behaviour of isolated bars cannot represent the behaviour of reinforcing bars inside RC columns. Moreover, it is found that the buckling length of vertical reinforcement has a significant influence on the pinching response of RC columns and also reduces the low-cycle fatigue life of buckled reinforcemen

Polls and the political process: the use of opinion polls by political parties and mass media organizations in European post‐communist societies (1990–95)

Opinion polling occupies a significant role within the political process of most liberal-capitalist societies, where it is used by governments, parties and the mass media alike. This paper examines the extent to which polls are used for the same purposes in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular, for bringing political elites and citizens together. It argues that these political elites are more concerned with using opinion polls for gaining competitive advantage over their rivals and for reaffirming their political power, than for devolving political power to citizens and improving the general processes of democratization

Pregnancy and childbirth in English prisons : institutional ignominy and the pains of imprisonment

© 2020 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL.With a prison population of approximately 9000 women in England, it is estimated that approximately 600 pregnancies and 100 births occur annually. Despite an extensive literature on the sociology of reproduction, pregnancy and childbirth among women prisoners is under‐researched. This article reports an ethnographic study in three English prisons undertaken in 2015‐2016, including interviews with 22 prisoners, six women released from prison and 10 staff members. Pregnant prisoners experience numerous additional difficulties in prison including the ambiguous status of a pregnant prisoner, physical aspects of pregnancy and the degradation of the handcuffed or chained prisoner during visits to the more public setting of hospital. This article draws on Erving Goffman's concepts of closed institutions, dramaturgy and mortification of self, Crewe et al.'s work on the gendered pains of imprisonment and Crawley's notion of ‘institutional thoughtlessness’, and proposes a new concept of institutional ignominy to understand the embodied situation of the pregnant prisoner.Peer reviewe