ABSTRACT
Our theoretical approach to desistance draws from political economy to provide a wider and longer-term context to our close-up study of the lives of British Pakistani Muslim young men who offend, beyond what participants told us, whilst uncovering the impact of social relations on their offending: the very possibility of desistance, in the first place, in an officially induced criminogenic environment; their search for identity and meaning in the place of their criminality; the adverse effects of their prison experiences and leaving prison in an increasingly punitive society where rehabilitation has vanished; the historical racial, social and economic marginalisation of the ethnic group to which they belong and the different responses to this marginalisation – ultimately, this is a question of their social integration, and their place in British society, in a word, their future. Applying an empirically grounded, plural political economy of crime, the study looks at the relationship between social structure, place and individual biography. Our theoretical narrative is driven by our place-based societal conjunctural analysis of economic and political history, and the myriad policies that have influenced the social and ethnic groups studied, particularly the peculiar and unique position of British Pakistanis in Britain’s social and economic structure, as well as debates about the post-colonial and intergenerational diaspora of the ethnic group to which the men belong. We also approach punishment from a political economy of crime perspective, particularly focusing on prison and re-entry experiences and their influence on desistance, given that Muslims are the proportionally fastest growing ethnic faction of the prison population in Britain.
