The stains of imprisonment: Moral communication and men convicted of sex offenses By A. Ievins, Oakland, CA.: University of California Press. 2023. pp. 214. £30.00 (pbk); free (ebk). ISBN: 9780520383715

Abstract

To be found guilty of an offence is to be marked not just as a wrongdoer, but an ‘offender’. To be found guilty of a sexual offence is to be doubly marked – to become the worst of the worst: a ‘sex offender’. In this short book, Ievins reports an ethnography of life in HMP Stafford – an English Category C prison devoted exclusively to incarcerating sex offenders.

The stains of imprisonment is deeply concerned with questions of truth, identity and communication. What is the nature of truth in the aftermath of (allegations of and/or convictions for) serious violence, both in the context of penal institutions and processes and of academic research into them? How do those ‘stained’ with the label of ‘sex offender’ come to terms with this identity, especially within a prison environment characterised as one specifically for sex offenders? How do the realities of lived experiences in a complex and (historically, institutionally and socially) contingent prison setting impact upon the meanings (intentional or otherwise) communicated by criminal sentences to penal subjects? Not least, how do researchers engage authentically with participants in such circumstances, letting them tell their stories and looking for the human being behind the crime, without denying or obscuring the experiences of survivors of sexual violence?

Ievins lays out this complex, thought-provoking, and empathetic enquiry in eight chapters. Chapter 1 places the book in a wider context of feminist and other discourses about the validity of state punishment, in general and in the context of sexual offending. Chapter 2 discusses the idea that punishment serves the purpose of moral communication and identifies a central tension in academic criminology, to which her book is addressed. On the one hand, penal theorists speak abstractly about what punishment should do without thinking about how institutions actually work in practice. On the other, prison sociologists typically insulate themselves from wider theoretical and normative contexts. Both sets of scholars, Ievins forcefully argues, therefore separate themselves from a full understanding of prisons and wider criminal justice and need to interface with each other's work to produce meaningful and impactful discussions of penal phenomena. Chapter 2 also sets up the empirical study, with a particular focus on HMP Stafford as the research site, and provides a brief methodological note, including a valuable reflection on the challenges of doing research in a sex offenders’ prison as a young female criminologist.

Chapters 3 through 7 discuss different aspects of the empirical data generated by Ievins's ethnography. Chapter 3 considers three structural factors impacting on participants’ understanding of their punishment, which affected the messages they perceived as being communicated by their punishment. These were: the legal framework by which offenders were officially designated ‘sex offenders’; the shameful ‘stain’ associated with the ‘sex offender’ label, which encouraged subjects to attempt to minimise and avoid their offending, rather than engaging with their convictions as wrongs; and a rehabilitative regime which requires participants to accept guilt, and which focuses on character and riskiness, reinforcing the idea of punishment targeting the actor, rather than the act.

Chapters 4 and 5 provide a typology of different attitudes taken by prisoners in coming to terms with the sex offender status, dealing respectively with those who accepted their guilt, and those who continued to protest their innocence. While recognising the limitations of sorting unique individuals into discrete categories, Ievins identifies seven groups of attitudes towards imprisonment at HMP Stafford, five involving the acceptance of guilt, at least technically, and two contesting it. Ievins considers how these types of attitudes conditioned the experiences and interactions of the prisoners holding them, and their impact on wider prison life and prison order.

Chapters 6 and 7 consider, respectively, the role of prison officers and of prisoners themselves in setting the bounds of community within the prison. The contributions of both sets of actors, while seeking to avoid direct condemnation of individuals or engagement with the specifics of particular offences, paradoxically lead to a generalised sense of shame and condemnation of ‘sex offenders’ as inherently dangerous and undeserving of respect. This further encouraged prisoners to distance themselves from recognition of wrongdoing and prevented the meaningful moral communication that penal theorists frequently argue that institutions like prisons should facilitate.

Chapter 8 draws these themes together and presents some (rather abstract and brief) possibilities for reforms that might make punishments more effective, whether by abolitionist or non-penal interventions, or by penal reform.

Ievins's book has a great deal to commend it. It is a fascinating and engaging snapshot of an artificial community, built around the knowledge that almost everyone in it has committed a grievous criminal wrong, but also around denying and avoiding any recognition thereof. Her major metaphor, the ‘stain’, is explored carefully, for example, drawing out the ways in which a range of actors’ identities can be tainted by mere association, including family members, prison officers and fellow prisoners. It is written in a deeply accessible style, making it appropriate for students while still holding value for academic, activist and practitioner audiences. Its central messages are important and valuable: that effective criminal justice requires a more sophisticated engagement with both the abstract normative and the granular pragmatic than is often the case in academic scholarship; that the claim that one is sent to prison ‘as punishment, not for punishment’ disguises and denies the role that the implementation of punishment (for example, in prisons) affects the subject's understanding of their punishment; and that empathy is not a zero-sum game, even in the most heinous of offences.

The book is also extremely valuable as an exercise in reflexivity, laying out the challenging nature of doing research as a young woman in a sex offenders’ prison. It would be especially useful to anyone doing similar sorts of research in spaces in which they are minoritised, reflecting keenly upon the challenges (both methodological and personal) of this kind of research.

In particular, Ievins reflects critically on her own struggle to separate out condemnation of specific wrongs from moral judgment of prisoners themselves, exposing the nuances and complexities that theorists of punishment often skate over. Ievins notes that she agreed not to review a participant's case file after their interview, but later Googled him anyway (p.81). I would have liked to see a further discussion of the ethical ramifications of: (i) doing this; and (ii) including the results of her search in the book (later, on pp.146–147, she contextualises this as an ‘impulsive’ act, and accepts that it might have been ‘disloyal’ to her participant, but does not really reflect on how these impressions interact with questions of research ethics and, in particular, informed participant consent). Googling her participant involved accessing axiomatically public data, yes, but in the context of her earlier endorsement of the idea of the ‘right to be forgotten’, and of a promise not to look at the participant's official case history, the ethics of this inclusion feel murkier, and it seems to me that the book would have been enhanced by engaging with this issue in more detail. I could not help the impression that hard ethical questions have been glossed over, and this is a shame, not because it means that the research is unethical but precisely because what makes research ethical is often not a simple, cut-and-dry thing. Criminological monographs often shy away from the level of methodological detail we expect, for instance, of doctoral research, but as a result they run the risk of skimming over important questions of methodological rigour, while also making it harder for readers to reflect critically on their own methodological approaches while reading them. The stains of imprisonment only somewhat avoids that risk.

Nevertheless, Ievins's frank discussion of her approach as a researcher exposes an important, and potentially uncomfortable, point: as criminologists we often make pronouncements about what ‘we’ (citizens, penal professionals and/or academics) should do, regardless of how easy those pronouncements are to follow. In theory, it should be easy to separate the act from the actor, the culpability from the character, but in practice this is often a more cognitively and emotionally difficult task than scholars (especially more theoretical scholars like myself) generally recognise. In detailing her own experience of being ‘duped’ (p.148) by the binary of the ‘sex offender’ label, which denies the complexity of seemingly good and likeable people having done vile or even atrocious things, Ievins reminds us that while it is easy to say that we should embrace this complexity, we cannot just talk ourselves into automatically and instinctively doing so. This is a lesson that criminal justice scholars of all stripes could stand to bear in mind. Ievins's book is a salutary reminder that we should not excuse failures to live up to high standards when they are justifiably high; but neither should we lose sight of the difficulties of always doing the right thing, especially in the emotive and morally charged context of sexual offences.