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.

"An outstanding example of longitudinal qualitative analysis, Halsey and Deegan's Young Offenders allows for a deep, long-term immersion into the lives of a group of young people who have been demonised and dismissed by wider society. The rich complexity of their often tragic lives vividly emerges across the chapters in an example of genuine social science, as it ought to be." - Shadd Maruna, Dean, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, USA "Halsey and Deegan provide offender accounts that are at once frustrating and heart-wrenching, yet illuminating and refreshing in their complexity. They reveal how the joining of disadvantaged backgrounds and unfair post-incarceration policies create barriers for young offenders wanting to desist. More important, they show how desistance can take surprisingly varied forms, which is a key contribution and challenge to previous criminal life course studies." - Randol Contreras, Sociology Department, University of Toronto, Canada

• 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