The limits of reform: Punishment and sexual offending

Alice Ievins, University of Liverpool

Across the Global North, sexual violence is no longer seen as a private matter, and activists and politicians frequently demand that these crimes should be more frequently criminalised and more rigorously punished. As a result, ‘sex offenders’ are becoming a particular target of the penal state: prisoners convicted of sex offences make up an ever-increasing proportion of the prison population, and are also subjected to increasingly tight and capacious legal restrictions. In this paper, Alice Ievins will try to characterise the forms of penal power applied to people convicted of sex offences within and beyond the prison, and consider what lessons this offers to social analyses of penality more broadly.

Bio:

Alice Ievins is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Liverpool. She previously completed a PhD and conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Stains of Imprisonment: Moral Communication and Men Convicted of Sex Offenses (University of California Press, 2023) and of a number of articles on emotional dimensions of imprisonment and on comparative penal cultures.

This workshop is part of the Social Penalities Across Boundaries series which is organised by Professor Richard Sparks, University of Edinburgh, and Professor Máximo Sozzo, Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Argentina (UNL).

The Limits of Reform: Punishment and Sexual Offending