British Pakistanis and Desistance: A Political Economy Approach

• In Event: European Developmental and Life-course Criminology Working Group, Panel 2: Qualitative research on criminal careers

Abstract

Aspects of the impact of economic and social relations on offending and desistance are discussed drawing upon a long-term ethnographic study of poverty, prison and identity among two groups of British Pakistanis living in Bradford, UK. One group cycled between prison and neighbourhood as they engaged in entrepreneurial criminality through heroin drug markets; the other group were ex-rioters who as young people had received lengthy prison sentences. The paper addresses the possibility of desistance in a deindustrialised, officially induced criminogenic environment; their search for identity and meaning in the place of their criminality; the adverse effects of their prison experiences and leaving prison in an increasingly punitive society where rehabilitation has vanished; the historical racial, social and economic marginalisation of the ethnic group to which they belong and the different responses to this marginalisation. Ultimately, the paper asks about their social integration, and their place in British society, in a word, their future. The paper concludes that within the groups we spoke to –drug dealers and the ex-rioters – their social and economic relations primarily drove criminal solutions not their ethnicity. Nevertheless, the redemptive possibilities offered in a postponed and idealised or perhaps imagined ‘pure’ ‘Muslim’ identity rooted in the ongoing membership of a religious and cultural group and social relations may yet procure for them what they really crave, which is a future life led by law-abiding respectability, status and honour (biraderi).

Authors

• Colin Webster, Leeds Beckett University

• Mohammed Qasim, Leeds Beckett University