Written as a novel, Criminal tells the vivid, shocking story of Walsh's life. He recounts his Wild, confused childhood in the hands of a mother who was unableto look after him and a father who, despite his irresponsible, criminal lifestyle, loved his son and cared about him. He tells of his unhappy adolescence, increasingly dominated by drugs and crime, and of the arrest, which gave him t e shock heneeded to make him want to turn his life around. In the final chapters he describes some of the workshops he's been running, including one'in which male prisoners wrote stories for their children. In Walsh's own words, it is a book about the decision he made to stop being the victim of his upbringing.