Shortly after being released from what would be my last time in prison, I started a journey in higher education that has culminated in the publication of this book. It was the close of the 1990s and the beginning of the millennium: a time when an interest in masculinities and a so-called âcrisis in masculinityâ had for a number of years been fiercely debated both in the academy and in popular media. The late 1990s marked the height of oversimplified media and political representations of the crisis discourse that positioned boys and men as a homogenous group who were suffering as a result of the success of women/girls in education and the workplace. I spent a large part of this decade in and out of a Manchester prison, encountering time and time again the same types of men. There were no noticeable changes in this population to reflect this crisis among all men; we all came from very similar environments.
I was born and raised on a council estate in Greater Manchester. I lived with my mother and stepfather whoâafter a number of redundancies (before I was old enough to remember them ever being employed)âsurvived on benefits that were occasionally topped up with âfiddlyâ cash-in-hand work. After being expelled from school at the age of 15âhaving become involved in low-level criminality and accumulating several convictions during my childhood and early teensâI sought out legitimate forms of employment once I was old enough to. For a number of years, as a young man without qualifications and with a criminal record, I moved between exploitiveâand, in some cases, abusiveâemployment positions, unemployment and sporadic crime. With growing disillusionment at my prospects of finding legitimate work and falling ever deeper into local drug and criminal cultures, criminality took over as my main activity and source of income. Inevitably, periods of incarceration followed.
In the concluding chapter, I discuss the critical moment that prompted my transition from a prisoner to an academic. The important point to emphasise hereâand the reason for this disclosureâis to highlight how central my introduction to feminist-inspired theory and research was in the early stages of my higher education career. As I explain in Chapter 2, this scholarshipâlargely influenced by the work of Connell (1995, 2000)âchallenges the idea of a singular or homogenous masculinity espoused by the proponents of crisis discourses and instead recognises the intersection of class, place and other social categories in creating multiple and hierarchically positioned masculinities. Most importantly, it profoundly captures many of my experiences as a boy and then a young man negotiating the challenges of the streets, education and employment. This personal identification with writing on masculinities is what has both nurtured and sustained my interest. It is what inspired this project and in doing so it has afforded me the necessary capital(s) to be able to contribute to âdoing masculinityâ differently.
Having been out of prison for almost two decades, my research career has been punctuated byâand enriched byâmy experiences of working with excluded boys and men in various contexts: on the streets of impoverished estates, in schoolsâ exclusion centres and in prisons. Unfortunately, in doing this work I have not seen enough research on gender and masculinities that has been conducted outside of the academy in order to inform and improve the lives of the men who it represents.
Over the same period, academic interest in boys, men and masculinities has grown at a remarkable rate and there has been increasing rates of recognition of the cost of constructing masculinities under profound structural disadvantages. With this the UK has witnessed some of the highest rates of academic underachievement among often âbright, working-class boysâ (see Allen et al. 2015; House of Commons Educational Committee 2014). During this period, England and Wales have also seen surging incarceration rates, with numbers more than doubling from 41,800 in 1993 to a record 88,179 at the close of 2011 (Sturge 2020). The vast majority of this populationâindeed, of all prisoners around the worldâare male. Mostly undereducated men were drawn from some of the most impoverished working-class neighbourhoods (Crewe 2009; Jewkes 2002; McAra and McVie 2013; Phillips 2012).
A recent sweep of the longitudinal study, The Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, for instance, has found that pupils who have been excluded from school at the age of 12 are four times more likely to end up in prison than other children (McAra and McVie 2013). Kennedy (2013) discovered that 900 of the 942 young male prisoners who were surveyed had, at some point, been excluded from school; more than a third of these individuals were aged just 14 when they last attended school. Sally Coates (2016), in her Review of Education in Prison, noted that 42% of individuals across the prison estate report having been excluded from school. In the same review, she points out that more than half of those who enter prison are assessed as having the literacy and numeracy abilities of primary school age children and that 47% of them have no qualifications (ibid.).
Data released from the Ministry of Justiceâs (MOJ) recent analysis of the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SPCR) longitudinal cohort study found that over two-thirds of newly sentenced prisoners were unemployed four weeks before they had been taken into custody. Those who had worked reported being paid lower wages than the average rate of pay for the working-age population (Brunton-Smith and Hopkins 2013). In their 2018 Employment and Education Strategy, the Ministry of Justice highlight the fact that just 17% of people who leave prison have managed to secure paid, P45 employment a year after their release (MoJ 2018).
There is a body of rich empirical research looking at masculinities of marginalised (young) men in education (Corrigan 1979; Evans 2006; Frosh et al. 2002; Mac an Ghaill 1994; OâDonnell and Sharpe 2000; Willis 1977), on the streets (Anderson 1999; Alexander 2000; Bourgois 2003; Gunter 2010), in employment and in the workplace (McDowell 2003; McDowell et al. 2014; Nayak 2006; Roberts 2018). Largely, this scholarship has explored how the relationship between structural disadvantages and (restricted) agency generates cultures or identities that reproduce and amplify existing forms of marginalisation that for manyâas the data above suggestâlead to imprisonment.
Scholarship on schooling in poor neighbourhoods has shown, for instance, how some schools are under-resourced. Consequently, they are failing to equip many of their pupilsâparticularly boysâwith adequate social capital to transcend the barriers of poverty. Instead these schools become key sites in which patterns of exclusion are reproduced (Ball 2003; Reay 2018). Paul Willisâs (1977) and Paul Corriganâs (1979) studies in the mid to late 1970s and the surge of interest in masculinities over the last three decades have generated an impressive interdisciplinary scholarship that has shown how schools are crucial sites in the formation and reproduction of versions of working-class masculinities constructed through having a âlaffâ (Willis 1977) fighting, fucking and football (Mac an Ghaill 1994).
Previously...