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

Abstract

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.