Dale C. Spencer – författare

Poverty and unemployment are on the rise among Canadian youth.Clearly something needs to change, but current social-assistance modelsare based on problematic assumptions about the lives and possibletrajectories of "risky" young people.

Reimagining Intervention in Young Lives explores thedifficulties many marginalized young people encounter with the"support system" available to them, as well as the socialforces that push them to the margins in the first place. Drawn frominterviews with forty-five patrons of a youth drop-in centre, thisimportant work resituates the nexus of the problem from theidentification of individual "risk factors" to therecognition of the contradictions and barriers contained in the verysocial-aid structures that are meant to bring their target populationsback in to the fold of "normal" society.

Intervention is indeed necessary, but more to challenge theprevailing structures that incorrectly presume how youth themselvesinterpret risk, poverty, and, most important of all, their ownpotential.

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.