Dr Alice Ievins

Alice was a member of the Institute from when she started her Masters in 2011. She worked for the Comparative Penology project, conducting ethnographic research in England & Wales and Norway in prisons holding women and prisons holding men convicted of sex offences, and was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow. In October 2019, she started working on ‘A good life in prison? Everyday ethics in a prison holding young men’, which is funded by an ESRC New Investigator Grant. This project will explore how young adult male prisoners (those aged between 18 and 24) define and pursue a ‘good life’ while they are incarcerated. It hopes to offer a more ‘appreciative’ account of the social worlds of imprisoned young people, who are normally seen, by academics and politicians, as both dangerous and vulnerable. By making use of the growing literature in the anthropology of ethics, Alice hopes to produce an account of the way in which people in prison try to live morally meaningful lives, and to find ‘goodness’ even in a context defined by stark power imbalances, severe deprivation, and complex social relationships.

Alice is currently preparing a manuscript for a book entitled The Stains of Imprisonment: Moral Communication and Social Relationships in a Prison for Men Convicted of Sex Offences, which should be published in 2023 by University of California Press as part of their Gender and Justice series. The book builds on her PhD research and seeks to bring sociological research on the experience of imprisonment into conversation with work on the purpose of punishment and on the best way of responding to harm. Its main argument is that prisons are morally communicative institutions: they say something to those they hold about the offences which led them there and the implications these offences have for their moral character, and much of this moral meaning is communicated through the prosaic yet power-imbued processes which make up daily life in custody.