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Prison Officers, Professionalism, and Moral Judgement

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Sexual Crime and the Experience of Imprisonment

Part of the book series: Sexual Crime ((SEXCR))

Abstract

The chapter is based on an ethnographic study of an English prison for men convicted of sex offences. It describes prison officers’ attitudes towards prisoners’ offences and their social identities as ‘sex offenders’ and argues that these attitudes reflected officers’ penal philosophies. It suggests that most officers demonstrated a ‘thin custodial’ philosophy: they aspired to treat prisoners impartially, and thus they avoided finding out about prisoners’ offences as this knowledge might lead them to treat prisoners differently. More experienced officers displayed a ‘thick professionalism’ philosophy: they were future-oriented and hoped to rehabilitate prisoners, and thus believed offences were relevant to their role. Regardless of the model, prisoners perceived a moral barrier between themselves and staff, one expressed through disengagement and misrecognition.

I would like to extend the warmest gratitude to everyone who allowed me to interview and engage with them during this project, whether they were imprisoned in or employed by HMP Stafford. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague, Julie Laursen, for her invaluable comments on this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    VPs are prisoners requiring long-term segregation under Rule 45 (previously Rule 43), either to maintain good order and discipline or in order to ensure their safety. A great many of these prisoners—Sampson (1994) estimates 70 per cent, although the proportion has likely increased in recent years—have been convicted of sex offences.

  2. 2.

    Ahmad (1996), Liebling, Muir, et al. (1999), and Drake (2006) all failed to find any statistically significant differences in prisoners’ experiences based on offence type, suggesting that what matters is how they are treated within the prison and not what they have done.

  3. 3.

    Offender Supervisors are uniformed officers who are employed to assist prisoners to carry out their sentence plan of offending-behaviour work. In comparison to Basic Grade Officers, then, they are required to have more intimate knowledge of prisoners’ cases.

  4. 4.

    ‘Nonce’: a slang term for a sex offender, particularly one who has offended against children. Names have been changed to protect identities.

  5. 5.

    This project only started after the re-roll and therefore it is difficult to say if officers changed their practice when they started working solely with people convicted of sex offences. Nevertheless, there are some indications that the quality of power had changed and its quantity had increased following the re-roll (see Ievins, 2017, pp. 149–165).

  6. 6.

    An ‘underachieve’: a warning for poor behaviour.

  7. 7.

    I was present for this conversation—a friendly chat about music and food choices, the sort of mundane conversation which many prisoners insisted was rare in Stafford.

  8. 8.

    Depending on their convictions and their risk level, some prisoners are not allowed any access to photographs of children. This is not the case for all prisoners convicted of sexual offences against children, and therefore it is not always clear to them why they have these restrictions.

  9. 9.

    In England and Wales, the age of sexual consent is 16, irrespective of the age of the other sexual partner or the view of the parents.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Prisons Research Centre, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK

    Alice Ievins

Authors
  1. Alice Ievins
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Correspondence to Alice Ievins .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Nicholas Blagden

  2. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Belinda Winder

  3. HMP Whatton, Nottingham, UK

    Kerensa Hocken

  4. Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Rebecca Lievesley

  5. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Phil Banyard

  6. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Helen Elliott

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Ievins, A. (2019). Prison Officers, Professionalism, and Moral Judgement. In: Blagden, N., Winder, B., Hocken, K., Lievesley, R., Banyard, P., Elliott, H. (eds) Sexual Crime and the Experience of Imprisonment. Sexual Crime. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04930-0_4

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