The Stains of Imprisonment

Recent decades have seen a widespread effort to imprison more people for sexual violence. The Stains of Imprisonment offers an ethnographic account of one of the worlds that this push has created: an English prison for men convicted of sex offenses. This book examines the ways in which prisons are morally communicative institutions, instilling in prisoners particular ideas about the offenses they have committed—ideas that carry implications for prisoners’ moral character. Investigating the moral messages contained in the prosaic yet power-imbued processes that make up daily life in custody, Ievins finds that the prison she studied communicated a pervasive sense of disgust and shame, marking the men it held as permanently stained. Rather than promoting accountability, this message discouraged prisoners from engaging in serious moral reflection on the harms they had caused. Analyzing these effects, Ievins explores the role that imprisonment plays as a response to sexual harm, and the extent to which it takes us closer to and further from justice. “A highly original and empirically grounded account of what imprisonment communicates and fails to communicate to men convicted of sexual offenses. This book is, by some distance, the best-developed analysis of how men in this position experience and make sense of their punishment.” — FERGUS McNEILL, author of Pervasive Punishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervision “The Stains of Imprisonment gives the reader captivating insight into the world that is prison for men convicted of sex offenses. Ievins deftly weaves together theoretical discussions of feminism and the carceral with the nuanced experiences of the men interviewed. A definite must-read for anyone interested in punishment and prison.” — ROSEMARY RICCIARDELLI, author of Also Serving Time: Canada’s Provincial and Territorial Correctional Officer

‘Perfectly individualized and constantly visible’? Lateral tightness in a prison holding men convicted of sex offences

Late-modern penal power has been described as ‘tight’. Through the increasing use of indeterminate sentences and psychological assessment, and the growing insistence that prisoners engage in self-government, the prison monitors and seeks to change those it holds. This tight and disciplinarian power is often described as contributing to the increasing fragmentation and atomisation of the prisoner community. However, this article, which is based on research conducted in a English medium-security prison for men convicted of sex offences, argues that tightness can operate through the prisoner community, in a process which it terms ‘lateral regulation’. It shows that prisoners spend a lot of time observing, categorising and policing their peers, in ways which replicate and often uphold the more formal systems of power. However, the relationship between these two systems of power is complex, and prisoners’ collective self-regulation can conflict with and challenge the demands of the penal institution, in a way which reveals some of the weaknesses in the institution’s disciplinary gaze, and indicates the normative motivations underlying this regulation.RG-9778

‘Tightness’, recognition and penal power

Prison scholarship has tended to focus on the pains and frustrations that result from the use and over-use of penal power. Yet the absence of such power and the subjective benefits of its grip are also worthy of attention. This article begins by drawing on recent literature and research findings to develop the concept of ‘tightness’ beyond its initial formulation. Drawing primarily on data from a study of men convicted of sex offences, it goes on to explain that, in some circumstances, the reach and hold of penal power are not experienced as oppressive and undesirable, and, indeed, may be welcomed. Conversely, institutional inattention and an absence of grip may be experienced as painful. Prisons, then, can be ‘loose’ or ‘lax’ as well as ‘tight’. The article then discusses the different ways in which prisons exercise grip, and, in doing so, recognise or misrecognise the subjectivity of the individual prisoner. It concludes by identifying the connections between this ‘ground-up’ analysis of the relative legitimacy of different forms of penal intervention and recent discussions in penal theory about the proper role of the state in communicating censure and promoting personal repentance and change

Power, shame and social relations in prisons for men convicted of sex offences

Since 2016, the Comparative Penology (COMPEN) project, led by Ben Crewe, has been conducting a large-scale comparison of penal policymaking and the prisoner experience in England and Wales and Norway. At its core, the project is an attempt to determine whether the Nordic Exceptionalism thesis — the idea that Nordic penal systems have a liberal-humanitarian culture and have resisted the punitive turn to which all other Western countries have succumbed — stands up to detailed empirical analysis. The COMPEN project is particularly interested in the experience of two groups who are often overlooked in the literature on imprisonment: women, and men convicted of sex offences. It is the second of these groups which is the focus of this article

Authoritarian exclusion and laissez‐faire inclusion: Comparing the punishment of men convicted of sex offenses in England & Wales and Norway*

Comparative penologists have described neoliberal and social democratic jurisdictions as though they exist at opposite ends of a continuum of inclusion and exclusion, and as though neoliberal states are inactive and social democratic states are invasive. This article, which is based on over 129 interviews with men convicted of sex offences in England & Wales and Norway, uses Cohen’s work on inclusion and McNeill’s typology of rehabilitative forms to complicate this simplistic binary. It argues that the punishment of men convicted of sex offences in England & Wales was demanding but exclusionary: it imposed strict legal restrictions on these men during and after their imprisonment, blocking them from engaging in social and moral rehabilitation and providing a limited and treacherous route to change. In Norway, punishment operated in a way which was formally inclusionary but surprisingly laissez-faire: prisoners retained their legal rights during and after their incarceration, but the lack of opportunities to discuss their offending meant that their sentences were rarely experienced as meaningful, and their formal inclusion was not enough for them to feel substantially included after release.This work was supported by the European Research Council [Consolidator grant number 648691]

‘Tightness’, recognition and penal power

Prison scholarship has tended to focus on the pains and frustrations that result from the use and over-use of penal power. Yet the absence of such power and the subjective benefits of its grip are also worthy of attention. This article begins by drawing on recent literature and research findings to develop the concept of ‘tightness’ beyond its initial formulation. Drawing primarily on data from a study of men convicted of sex offences, it goes on to explain that, in some circumstances, the reach and hold of penal power are not experienced as oppressive and undesirable, and, indeed, may be welcomed. Conversely, institutional inattention and an absence of grip may be experienced as painful. Prisons, then, can be ‘loose’ or ‘lax’ as well as ‘tight’. The article then discusses the different ways in which prisons exercise grip, and, in doing so, recognise or misrecognise the subjectivity of the individual prisoner. It concludes by identifying the connections between this ‘ground-up’ analysis of the relative legitimacy of different forms of penal intervention and recent discussions in penal theory about the proper role of the state in communicating censure and promoting personal repentance and change

Adaptation, Moral Community and Power in a Prison for Men Convicted of Sex Offences

This thesis explores the experiences of imprisonment of men held in HMP Stafford, an English medium-security prison for men convicted of sexual offences. Sex offenders constitute a significant proportion of the prison population – almost one in five sentenced adult men have been convicted of a sex offence – but they have been consistently overlooked by prison researchers. In this thesis, I redress this imbalance by exploring the experiences of a hitherto overlooked group, and generate some theoretical insights which will be of relevance to wider studies of imprisonment. The thesis is based on an in-depth ethnographic study conducted over a five-month period. It included 42 long semi-structured interviews with prisoners, 12 shorter semi-structured interviews with prison officers, and extended periods of participant observation of day-to-day life in the prison. It focuses on three areas which were of particular salience to these men, all of which have been explored in detail in existing studies of mainstream imprisonment: first, the ways in which they adapted to their sentence; second, the sorts of social and moral communities they formed amongst themselves; and third, the relationships they formed with staff and the way the prison’s power operated on them. All three of these areas – adaptation, moral community and power – were inflected by two issues of even greater significance: the fact that they were serving sentences for sexual offences, and their resulting social identities as ‘sex offenders’. By drawing attention to this issue, I hope to move on from the conventional mode of understanding the prison, as a disciplinary institution structured solely by power, to one which takes more seriously the moral functions and effects of the prison as a condemnatory institution.Funded the The Dawes Trus