‘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

"A different world" exploring and understanding the climate of a recently re-rolled sexual offender prison

Understanding how sexual offenders experience prison and its environment is important because such experiences can impact on rehabilitation outcomes. The purpose of this research investigation was to explore the rehabilitative and therapeutic climate of a recently re-rolled sexual offender prison. The research took a mixed methods approach and consisted of quantitative and qualitative phases. There were differences between prisoners and staff on their perception of the prison climate and for prisoner and staff relationships. The qualitative results helped to explain the quantitative findings and added a more nuanced understanding of the experience of the prison, the nature of prisoner and staff relationships and the opportunities for personal growth within the prison. The study has important implications for prisons that co-locate sexual offenders and want to provide an environment conducive to rehabilitation

Maternal and neonatal risk factors for childhood type 1 diabetes: a matched case-control study

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The prison as a reinventive institution

There is plentiful evidence that imprisonment is painful, harmful and criminogenic. However, alongside accounts that emphasize such consequences are alternative narratives, in which some prisoners claim that carceral confinement has been a positive intervention in their life. Drawing on Scott’s idea of the reinventive institution, this article explores these narratives, which—contra Goffman—involve a voluntaristic commitment to the prison, active engagement in the process of identity reconstruction, normative alignment with institutional values and the role of lateral regulation in shaping the prisoner’s new self. Our analysis emphasizes the impact of the prison as an institutional form, and the ways that, in interaction with particular biographical experiences, it produces narratives of reinvention which imply an inversion of its normal destructive processes. Our argument is not a defence of imprisonment, but an attempt to theorize a narrative claim that, although expressed by a minority of prisoners, merits proper analysis.</jats:p