Boys’ zone stories: Perspectives from a young men’s prison

Abstract

This article explores aspects of young men’s gender identities as they serve time in an English Young Offender Institution. Based on qualitative research, the article discusses three dimensions of the way the young men talk about their lives, inside and outside prison. It is argued that the evocation of a specific condition of being ‘ on road’ is linked to forms of youthful masculine collectivity, ‘ my boys’, which valorize pre-modern forms of martial masculinity. These two themes converge in the pre-eminence of ‘ postcode pride’, the salience of ‘the local’ in the young men’s accounts of themselves. These aspects of the young men’s experience are explored with reference to other recent research findings on young men’s experience of ‘gang’ activity and living on the social margins.

Boredom and Action—Experiences from Youth Confinement

“…Similarly, I observe that stealing cars appears to constitute a refuge from the experience of "nothing to do" in the boys' everyday lives on the outside (see also Comack 2008;Earle 2011;Phillips 2008). Several boys explained that they often did not know what to do with themselves or expect of the future.…”

“…Collison (1996, 437), in his study of young "underclass" males in Britain in search of the "high life," has similar findings: "Schooling is a passport to success yet is repetitively denied to young men like these, as they deny it." Not having the skills or inclination for being successful in school or education, these boys turn to different areas for success, such as generating excitement through crime (Earle 2011;Hallsworth and Silverstone 2009). Through leading the "high life" in the street, the boys build up notions of respect and honor connected to a particular form of hypermasculinity in which friendship and loyalty is highly valued.…”

Developing Convict Criminology Beyond North America

“…The enormous growth of criminology in British universities in recent years has also resulted in a corresponding increase in the number of former and current prison officers completing undergraduate criminology degrees. Their movement onward to PhDs and academic careers has also grown significantly but can hardly be said to have been matched by those from the other side of the bars (Earle, 2011, Jewkes 2014. Thus, the BCC steering group has resolved to focus on developing contacts among current as well as former prisoners, and to offer academic mentoring for prisoners or ex-prisoners doing undergraduate as well as graduate degrees.…”

“…For example, the 'offender transition learning group' project; a project being led by a collection of academics and practitioners, which is primarily focusing on the role education can play in improving prisoners' transition from prison to the community, and equally important, the role learning can play in desisting from crime. (Wacquant, 2002), there has been a growing current of rich qualitative and ethnographic studies of prison life within British criminology (see e.g., Crewe, 2009;Drake, 2013;Phillips, 2013;Drake, Earle & Sloan, 2015), some of which has focused on the development of prisoner accounts (Crewe & Bennett 2012, Earle, 2011Earle, 2014). For the most part, BCC has been well received within the criminological community and its panels have attracted lively debate.…”

“…Two of the original papers from the BSC in Newcastle were published as 'Developing a Convict Criminology group in the UK' (Aresti, 2012) and 'Prison and university: A tale of two institutions?' (Earle, 2011).…”