ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the long-term consequences on the lives of the young men who participated as teenagers and young adults and were arrested and sentenced for riot in the Bradford Disorders of 2001 are witness to the effects of early and punitive imprisonment among those who at the time had no appreciable history of offending. The challenges they faced upon release from prison, their experiences in prison and their feelings on the sentences they received raise general historical and theoretical questions about early imprisonment, criminal careers and desistance, as well as the wider issue of the Bradford Disorders of 2001, ethnicity, “crowds” and disorder. While criminality was not the cause of the riots, it became the consequence. As the city’s economy failed to recover from the impact of the riots, criminality and the criminal economy filled what had been hollowed out. The retrospective accounts of participants in the disorder revealed bitterness about what they saw around them, which alienated them not only from the authorities but from their own community too. Events two decades ago still overshadow the city’s damaged economy, in entrenched segregation and in the life chances of a new generation who were unborn when the riots occurred, and participants jailed. At a time when feelings ran high about racism, police brutality and being trapped in poverty with few prospects or hope of escape.
