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Young people living in Britain’s deprived communities risk becoming trapped in a “deadly symbiosis” where prison culture increasingly takes hold on the street, an academic has warned, writes Simeon Brody from Community Care Live.

And the growing convergence between prison and gang culture makes young people feeling more alienated from mainstream society, more likely to carry guns and increasingly seeing themselves as “soldiers”, John Pitts, University of Luton professor of socio-legal studies, told Community Care Live this week.

The deadly symbiosis theory was originally proposed by a US academic to describe gang culture in Chicago, but Pitts said research he was doing with ethnic minority communities in south London suggested it could take hold there.

He described young people who did not see their life going on beyond 25 and expected to “go out in a blaze of glory, and they don’t expect it to hurt”.

Pitt said groups involved in gun crime in south London had their origins in the penal system and brought the “cognitive landscape” of the prison system to their everyday life.

They needed support to help them break the loop they were stuck in and engage them in educational and vocational opportunities, he added.

In a presentation on racism in the criminal justice system, Pitt said crime was not disproportionate among black and minority communities but was chiefly related to poverty and disadvantage.