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This article explores the relationship between the current model of community sex offender management, which is underpinned by mechanism of control and enforcement, and desistance from sexual offending. Utilizing data from qualitative interviews with 20 men convicted of sexual offences, we found that while existing practices offer some reassurance to those managing the public protection arena, they do little to encourage the substantive processes of identity change which is necessary for long-term desistance. This raises important considerations for how current risk management practices may be improved to encourage desistance and community reintegration.

This article examines the changing nature of public protection police work in a climate of continued austerity and increasing prosecutions for sexual offending, which have made a significant impact on the workloads of police teams who manage and monitor registered sexual offenders in the community. This increase has run parallel to a decrease in the general policing budget, which has seen it cut by an average of 22% across England and Wales [BBC. (2017). Utilizing data from observations and in-depth qualitative interviews with police officers from a force in England, this article highlights the effect which cost-saving measures have had on the professional standards of the police service in the management of sex offenders; how collaborative working practices have been hindered by these austerity measures, and finally how continual cuts have had a detrimental effect on the police’s ability to protect the public.

Within the prison population there exists a subculture consisting of those prisoners who need protection; these individuals are the ones who reside in the vulnerable prisoner unit and include informers, ex-police officers, those with special educational needs and sex offenders. In short, this unit houses all those individuals who are at risk of attack from their fellow prisoners. Life within this subculture is different from life in the mainstream population; it is no less difficult, no less of an alien environment within which to survive, but the characteristics of the men ensure that the dominant moral order is unlike that of the main prison wings. Based on intensive fieldwork carried out with men aged 50 years and over in three English prisons, this article examines how child sex offenders, the most vilified subsection of the prison population, survive, and observes the differing ways in which both acceptance of, and resistance to, the prison regime become manipulated actions executed by extremely knowledgeable agents.