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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.

About the Author

Alice Ievins is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool.

Reviews

"Ievins’ work speaks to an urgent question at the forefront of feminist criminology: how can the legal system address sexual violence that persists throughout society, where high attrition rates persist in spite of decades of reforms? . . . Ievins takes up the challenge by detailing the daily life of some of those incarcerated for such violence."
— Feminist Legal Studies

"The Stains of Imprisonment is deeply concerned with questions of truth, identity and communication. . . . It is written in a deeply accessible style, making it appropriate for students while still holding value for academic, activist and practitioner audiences."
— The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice

"Alice Ievins’ The Stains of Imprisonment is one of the most rigorous and fascinating academic books I have read in recent years. It is a rich and honest prison ethnography, delicately navigating the complexities and layers of imprisonment while also being a theoretically informed text, bringing those ethnographic nuances into direct dialogue with some of the ‘grander’ narratives in penology and the sociology and philosophy of punishment."
— Social & Legal Studies

"A remarkable book on how imprisonment fails to generate effective moral communication to prisoners convicted of sex offenses and obstructs their reflection on, and acknowledgement of, the wrongs they have committed. . . . Alice Ievins' work is bound to stimulate future research on the nature and efficiency of the moral messaging of imprisonment, further questioning and destabilising the conventional wisdoms around the need for detention to reduce and avoid crime."
— Punishment & Society

"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 Officers