Thug Criminology combines the urgent and as yet silenced voices of former gang/street-involved peoples turned academics, alongside their allies, in order to challenge and disrupt mainstream and academic knowledge about urban youth gangs specifically, and the "streets" more broadly. The book questions how the "streets" – and the racialized and marginalized urban communities who inhabit them – are researched, taught, and subsequently politicized. It looks at who gets to produce such knowledge, who benefits from such knowledge, and whose voices are privileged within dominant academic and public policy discourses. Drawing on decolonizing methodologies, the book seeks to give voice to scholars with lived experience of　a "street" or gang life. Adam Ellis, Olga Marques, and Anthony Gunter reclaim the terms thug and gang to reconstruct the narrative around street-involved youth – seeing them not as criminals but rather as survivors of historical oppression and trauma. Challenging the colonial structure of criminology and other disciplines that focus on street crime, Thug Criminology aims to disrupt and disentangle the knowledge that has been produced on gangs and urban violence.　

This book aims to challenge current thinking about serious youth violence and gangs, and their racialisation by the media and the police. Written by an expert with over 14 years' experience in the field, it brings together research, theory and practice to influence policy. Placing gangs and urban violence in a broader social and political economic context, it argues that government-led policy and associated funding for anti-gangs work is counter-productive. It highlights how the street gang label is unfairly linked by both the news-media and police to black (and urban) youth street-based lifestyles/cultures and friendship groups, leading to the further criminalisation of innocent black youth via police targeting. The book is primarily aimed at practitioners, policy makers, academics as well as those community-minded individuals concerned about youth violence and social justice.

The 'problem' of young black men has loomed large in the news-media and academic research for more than forty years, highlighting and exacerbating moral panics about mugging, rioting, drug-dealing, knife and gun violence and much more. Young black British men feature in any descriptions of social alienation and discrimination, seen as suffering more than most in any measure of poverty, mental illness, school exclusions, educational under achievement and experiences of the youth justice system including imprisonment. For some commentators poverty and institutionalised racism are the root causes for this continued social marginalisation. In contrast other writers play down such interpretations, placing the blame on an urban black male youth culture, influenced by black American and Jamaican popular youth cultures, that is anti school and obsessed with the violence and hyper-masculinity of the street. Both positions tend to stereotype all young black males as belonging to a larger homogenous group. This book is based on an ethnographic study of young people undertaken in an East London neighbourhood. It provides a counterweight to the stereotype of 'dangerous' and 'underachieving' young black men. The focus is on young people aged between thirteen and twenty-one in an examination of the role of contemporary youth subcultures on the transitions and everyday life experiences particularly, but not exclusively, of black British Caribbean young men. The significance of home life, schooling, spatial locality, ethnicity and gender is explored providing a more nuanced and holistic understanding of the young participants' everyday lived experiences. Anthony Gunter is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of East London, UK. Before he worked for more than ten years in East London with young people as a detached youth and community worker and Project / Area Manager.