Rose Ricciardelli is Associate Professor and the Coordinator for Criminology in the Department of Sociology, Memorial University, Canada. Her research interests include risk, vulnerabilities, masculinities, prison culture, desistance, and lived experiences of prisoners, correctional officers, and police officers.

Dale C. Spencer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies and the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Carleton University, Canada. His research interests include masculinities, affect, emotions and the body, policing, violence, and Critical Victimology.

1. Introduction.....

2. The Chimeric Sex Offender....

3. Biopolitics, 'Vulnerability' and Sex Offenders...

4. Masculinities, Stigma and Failure....

5. Precarity, Exposure, and Violence...

6. Stigma, Sex Offenders, and Correctional Staff...

7. Sex Offenders and the Cultural Politics of Emotions in Prison Environments...

8. Conclusion...

Appendix: Corrections, Qualitative Methods, and Abductive analysis

References

Index

Sex offenders remain the most hated group of offenders, subject to a myriad of regulations and punishments beyond imprisonment, including sex offender registries, chemical and surgical castration, and global positioning electronic monitoring systems. While aspects of their experiences of imprisonment are documented, less is known about how sex offenders experience prison and community corrections spaces - and the implications of their status on their treatment and safety in such environments.
Violence, Sex Offenders, and Corrections critically assesses what is meant by the term 'sex offender', and acknowledges that such meanings are socially constructed, situated, and contingent. The book explores the person, crime, penal space, sexual orientation, legislation, and the community experiences of labelled sex offenders as well as the experiences of correctional officers working with said custodial populations. Ricciardelli and Spencer use conceptions of gender and embodiment to analyze how sex offenders are constituted as objects of fear and disgust and as deserving subjects of abjection and violence.