Hope, Despair, and Desistance: What Happens after People Are Imprisoned as "Sex Offenders"?

Abstract

Despite wide-spread public scrutiny concerning both the efficacy and moral legitimacy of current practices of policing and imprisonment, when it comes to sexual violence, the clarion call is still for ever-harsher policing, prosecution, and punishment. Imprisonment and punishment are suddenly and instinctively trusted as the only efficacious redress for such crimes. Therein, purportedly, lies the only means to accountability and to public safety. In particular, imprisoning people for sexual violence is assumed to serve four purposes, which, taken together, should contribute to a safer and more just future: first, that it creates safety for the community by expelling that which threatens it; second, that it affirms moral boundaries and vindicates the suffering of the victim by demonstrating that the community and the state acknowledge the wrongness of the sexually violent act (Hampton 1991; Walker 2006); third, that it facilitates individual accountability by communicating to the wrongdoer that they have done wrong (Duff 2001); and fourth, that it promotes individual moral change. In the following chapter we will argue that the imprisonment and punishment of men convicted of sex offences, as it is currently practiced in England & Wales, does not straightforwardly contribute to any of these goals. While it might temporarily incapacitate people, making it harder for them to commit sexual offences while they are incarcerated (although sexual violence continues to occur in prison), almost all people serving time for sexual offences are eventually released, but under conditions which do not lay the foundations for a positive shared future. As this chapter will argue, the legal restrictions and affixed to people convicted of sex offences combined with the identity collapse which their conviction precipitates mean that their imprisonment is experienced as a social death, depriving them of hope. Rather than fostering accountability and serving public safety, this makes it harder for them to fully desist and encourages them to insist that they are not responsible for their convictions.