ABSTRACT
Many young men were now stripped of the informal controls of waged employment and family responsibilities that had previously restrained their wilder excesses and brought them back into the fold of conforming nonoffending by their early twenties. Unskilled and poorly educated, they were now completely superfluous to the long-term requirements of post-industrial society. Excluded from legitimate employment opportunities and presenting themselves as unattractive propositions to young women as partners in long-term relationships many of these young men found themselves ‘frozen in a state of persistent adolescence’ (Pitts, 1996: 260). These restricted life chances had important implications for their involvement in crime because all the evidence suggests that ‘growing up’ also means growing out of crime (Rutherford, 1992). Stripped of legitimate access to adulthood these young men were trapped in a limbo world somewhere between childhood and adulthood long after the ‘developmental tasks’ of adolescence had been completed (Graham and Bowling, 1995). Now into their second – or even third – generation of what is a workless underclass in some geographical localities, this widely ostracised grouping – ‘would you let your children play, or even go to school, with them, now be honest’ – has become stereotyped as inherently criminogenic and drug-ridden with images that are frequently racialised (see Rose, 1999; Parenti, 2000; Bauman, 1998, 2000).
