Young Offenders

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.