ABSTRACT
As young British male Muslims are increasingly perceived as dangerous and criminal, their actual lived experience as offenders and their context are little studied or understood. The book deploys ‘desistance’ as a way of studying them start and persist with offending as well as their struggles to move away from crime in the context of their family formation, education, prison, neighbourhood change and long-term changes in the types, availability and quality of work. Influences encouraging criminality and moves away from crime include experiences of punishment, leaving prison and ‘being normal’; drug use; the role of friendship networks and shared religiosity; intimate relationships and forming families; schooling, life events and change; opportunities and constraints while participating in legitimate labour markets and welfare and in criminal markets in goods and services; being stuck in a locality whilst benefitting from local support and safety; and labour market discrimination and concentrated spatial poverty. To illustrate, three groups – drug dealers, ex-rioters and offenders’ fathers - were studied, all residing in the ex-woollen textile city of Bradford in West Yorkshire. There, offenders had cycled between prison and neighbourhood, whilst their fathers had struggled with the local collapse of textile employment, unemployment and poverty, followed by various transitions from textile to taxi and takeaway work. The long-term consequences of early and recurrent imprisonment for subsequent desistance were found to be decisive and adverse in influencing the operation of place-based criminal markets, and on later transitions and careers.
