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.

Mark Halsey is a Professor of Criminal Justice at Flinders University, Australia. Previous to this he taught criminology at the University of Melbourne. In 2012 he was awarded a four-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship for the study of the causes, experiences and consequences of intergenerational incarceration.

Simone Deegan was Project Officer for the Generativity in Young Male (Ex)Prisoners Project at Flinders University, Australia. Prior to this she worked as a criminal defence solicitor with the Legal Services Commission in the Magistrates and Youth Courts of South Australia. She has an ongoing interest in prisons and prison officer culture.

Introduction
1.Setting the Scene
2.Approach to the Field – Data
3.On Track
4.Recurring Breakdown
5.Major Derailment
6.Catastrophic Turn
7.Points of Unrest
8.Points of Light
Concluding Remarks