ABSTRACT
This ethnographic study of ‘poverty drug’ users, drug dealers and ex-rioters in some of the poorest neighbourhoods in England found that, entrepreneurial criminality, imprisonment and re-entry, and more recently, dependent drug use, were the key processes shaping criminal careers. These cohorts and groups, offenders and non-offenders alike shared a surfeit of risks because they lived in poor places, times and generations. Born in the depths of rapid deindustrialisation and radical restructuring of labour markets, welfare and education, our Bradford cohorts, each grew up within the same, impoverished generational terms of reference. The single most important material impediment to desisting from crime, however, was entering prison and re-entering life outside prison where a collapsed probation and rehabilitative system, and few opportunities, regrettably returned offenders to prison. These men’s attempts to desist from crime face intractable and insuperable obstacles, difficulties and challenges that go beyond personal agency and motivation to the policy and social structural constraints placed upon them, reflected in the well-known inadequacy of the support services offered them. This is because punishment, welfare, rehabilitation and work are situated and placed within political economy not the prison, courts or criminal justice system, the key to these men’s prospects are found in failed labour markets and places, whereby policing and penal sanctions are coercive ancillaries to the labour market, often when the offer of poor work is refused, and prison is meant to create conditions of life markedly more unpleasant than those experienced on the outside. To ensure that individuals are unable to sustain a living by criminal means and are deterred from tempting to try. Applying a political economy perspective to empirical processes of desistance our study reveals Muslim identity as a source of social integration and cohesion among young Muslim men who offend, as an aspiration not a reality, long replaced for them by the informal or criminal economy.
