How and why do some young people 'escape' from a life of crime while others remain in it? This landmark book is the first truly longitudinal study of deviancy that gets to the heart of the above question. During the mid-1970s, sociologist Howard Williamson studied a group of young offenders living in a disadvantaged area. Caught up in a vicious cycle of moving in and out of high risk situations, these youths survived largely on the streets. They left school in the 1970s, with few prospects and apparently bleak futures ahead of them. Twenty-five years later, Williamson decided to track down the men these boys had become in order to find out how their formative teenage years had shaped their futures. Of the original group of sixty-seven, seven were dead - not one of natural causes. Williamson interviewed at length half of those remaining about how their histories had unfolded with respect to personal and family relationships, the labour market, the criminal justice system, and their socio-economic situations. The resulting book is certain to become a classic for years to come. Many of Williamson's findings overturn expectations.
Their youthful offending sometimes came to a halt in early adulthood, sometimes persisted to the present day. More broadly, their lives were 'managed' in very different ways. Despite a prevailing 'what will be will be' mentality some shaped their futures while others just waited for things to happen. Most studies of young offenders deal only with the here and now, and follow-ups have proven to be notoriously elusive. Williamson's remarkable contribution to existing work in this area is that he has been able to locate so many of the youths he originally interviewed and has managed to record their life stories during the intervening twenty-five year period. The result is an extraordinary account of how many of these young people 'beat all the odds' while others succumbed and remained embedded in or on the margins of criminality and drugs culture. A celebration of success as much as a confirmation of predetermination, this book is a salutary read for anyone who wants to understand how the lives of real people unfold and the extent to which public policy really makes any difference.
It will also serve, implicitly, as a corrective to many contemporary social theories concerning risk and transition that have to date gone unchallenged.
- ISBN10 6610339481
- ISBN13 9786610339488
- Publish Date 1 October 2004 (first published 25 May 2004)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 11 May 2011
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Imprint Berg Publishers
- Format eBook
- Language English