The Stains of Imprisonment: Moral Communication and Men Convicted of Sex Offenses

Description

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. Contents Acknowledgments 1. Punishing Rape: Feminisms and the Carceral Conversation 2. Communicating Badly: Prisons as Morally Communicative Institutions 3. Distorting Institutions: Structuring the Moral Dialogue 4. Managing Guilt: Living as a “Sex Offender” in Prison 5. Maintaining Innocence: Contesting Guilt and Challenging Imprisonment 6. Moralizing Boundaries: Staff-Prisoner Relationships and the Communication of Difference 7. Denying Community: Social Relationships and the Dangers of Acknowledgment 8. Judging Prisons: The Limitations and Excesses of Denunciatory Punishment Notes References Index