They segregate themselves in terms of the town or city that they were living in up until their arrest, slotting into one of a number of different ‘firms’ – geographically determined gangs. The first question a new arrival is asked is ‘Where are you from?’ closely followed by ‘What estate?’ Many of the offenders have their postcodes tattooed on their arms and some have maps of their hometowns etched across the back of their necks. Rapists, paedophiles, torturers and murderers are indistinguishable from the general population. The walls of the cells are caked in racist graffiti and a thick, brown phlegm. It is icy cold during the winter and swelteringly hot during the summer. It is a large, stone building covered from top to bottom in barbed wire. HMP Leeds, commonly known as Armley Gaol, is one of the longest-running operational jails in the country. The second I stepped through the prison gates, I realised that I was in for a rough time. It was a crime of immense naivety: I was attempting to supplement my student loan by dabbling in things I knew little about. In August 2008, I was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for selling ecstasy whilst at university. I have studied gangs from within their midst in one of the toughest jails in the UK. I have spent time with every sector of criminal society, from low-level drug runners to national crime bosses. I have worked, eaten and slept within the company of convicted gang members. So what is my connection to gangland Britain? What makes me suited to writing a book about such a difficult area? My knowledge of this little-explored area stems from a year of immersion in the British prison system. Although the situation in the UK is nowhere near as severe as it has become in the United States, it is widely accepted that gang membership has seen a substantial, and continuing, rise. Gang members are responsible for just under a third of criminal offences and represent around fifteen per cent of known offenders. One in ten young people, between the ages of ten and nineteen, class themselves as belonging to a gang. Today, however, B ritain is enduring a gang crisis. Criminal subcultures are neither new, nor are they necessarily more violent than they have been in the past. Newspaper articles from the mid-1800s spoke of rising rates of mob violence and the corrosive impact of youth crime in our bigger cities: Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Edinburgh. They are not a modern phenomenon in Britain. For most purposes, a gang is simply a criminal collective working towards a common goal. Some are territorial others are focussed on acquisitive crime. Gangs take various forms, and academics argue over definitions. It was a tragedy that thrust an age-old issue back into the public consciousness: gangs. He died the innocent victim of a feud he neither knew nor cared about. ON 22 AUGUST 2007, an eleven-year-old boy named Rhys Jones was shot in the neck as he walked home from football training on the Croxteth Park estate in Liverpool. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The moral right of the author has been asserted.Īll rights reserved. Inside the Violent World of Britain’s Street Gangs