In her examination of the place of psychoanalysis inthe history of British criminology, Valiér mentionsthe Boy Scouts movement and sporting activities ashaving found favour among the therapists who foundedthe body that gave rise to the British Society ofCriminology. Such activities were seen as providing‘a more wholesome sphere for the expression ofyouthful energies’ (1998: 3). Kelly (2008) notesthat such ‘moral improvement’ has now fallen out offavour. But great claims are still made for sport asa means of broader development; see, for instance,the claims for the significance of sport in‘peacebuilding’ made by the United Nations (nd). Inprevious chapters, suggestions, even from Bentham,have been made for the benefits of sport as well asthe disbenefits. Here we assess some of the growingliterature around the role of sport in crimeprevention.

First we examine boxing, which is well represented inacademic, popular media and cultural representationsof the use of sport to prevent crime, aid torehabilitation or encourage desistance. After boxingwe consider joyriding, which does not involve directphysical violence but raises some of the same issuesof masculinity and the close relationship betweensport and crime. The next section considersfootball, rugby, basketball and other sports. Thequestion has to be asked whether such crimeprevention measures might also work for women'ssport. It should be noted that this chapter takes alargely uncritical approach, although Blackshaw andCrabbe (2004) discuss the ‘social control’ aspectsof sports schemes, while Stansfield (2015) suggeststhat sport fails in this regard.

Boxing

A former prison officer at Her Majesty's Youth OffenderInstitution Feltham broke the first rule of FightClub when he blew the whistle about illegal fightsorganised by officers among inmates. In fact, theill-advised action of allowing antagonists to settlescores among themselves might owe more to publicschool or Borstal than the complex meditation onmasculinity of Fight Club.

In Bring Back Borstal (2015), the‘boys’ play a game of rugby union against a localteam and go on cross-country runs – shades of thebook and subsequent film TheLoneliness of the Long Distance Runner(Sillitoe, 1959) – but they do not box. Severalfights break out and a punch ball takes a hammeringin episode 3 to allow one young man to ‘let off somesteam’.