How do some manage to leave the life of crime while others, of similar life-course circumstances, fall into further crime and incarceration? Young Offenders centres on the lived experiences of male offenders to explore the complex personal and situational factors that promote and derail the desistance process.
Examining the lives of fourteen young men aged between 15 and 29 who were interviewed repeatedly within and beyond custodial facilities over ten years in Australia, this book documents the circumstances associated with desistance from crime or intensification of serious repeat offending in each young man's life.
It explores the men's attitudes to crime, incarceration, family, work, education and intervention programs and, in order to better understand the lived contexts within which desistance or repeat offending occurs, Halsey and Deegan draw extensively on interviews with each young man's nominated significant others as well as interviews with prison directors, officers and offender rehabilitation managers.
The struggles of these men - their trajectories, successes and failings - are analysed in accordance with the political, social and economic contexts which bear upon them. This book offers a grounded, participant-led view of struggles for desistance in the early to mid-life course, and presents one of the most in-depth studies of young males seeking, if often failing, to find a life beyond crime and punishment.
Review: An outstanding example of longitudinal qualitative analysis, Halsey and Deegan's Young Offenders allows for a deep, long-term immersion into the lives of a group of young people who have been demonised and dismissed by wider society. The rich complexity of their often tragic lives vividly emerges across the chapters in an example of genuine social science, as it ought to be. - Shadd Maruna, Dean, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, USA Halsey and Deegan provide offender accounts that are at once frustrating and heart-wrenching, yet illuminating and refreshing in their complexity.
They reveal how the joining of disadvantaged backgrounds and unfair post-incarceration policies create barriers for young offenders wanting to desist. More important, they show how desistance can take surprisingly varied forms, which is a key contribution - and challenge - to previous criminal life course studies. - Randol Contreras, Sociology Department, University of Toronto, Canada
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