Making Sense Of Youth Crime

This comparative empirical study of policing in the United States and France draws on the authors' ten years of field work to contend that the police in both countries should be thought about as an amalgam of five distinct professional cultures or 'intelligence regimes'-each of which can be found in any given police department in both the United States and France. In particular, we contend that what police do as knowledge workers and how they make sense of the social problems such as collective offending by juveniles varies with the professional subcommunities or 'intelligence regimes' in which their particular knowledge work is embedded. The same problem can be looked at in fundamentally different ways even within a single police department, depending on the intelligence regime through which the problem is refracted.

The Second Edition of this best-selling text provides a fully revised and up-to-date critical analysis of a wide range of issues surrounding young people, disorder and crime. How and why have certain aspects of young people's behaviour come to be perceived as 'anti-social' and 'criminal'? Are young people now more of a threat than ever before? How can we make sense of New Labour's youth justice reforms? Is the youth justice system soft on crime? Are young people more in need of protection than disciplinary punishment? To develop a comprehensive criminology of youth the book deliberately moves.

Rather than providing students with "the answers," Making Sense of Criminal Justice: Policies and Practices, Third Edition, challenges them to think critically about how the criminal justice system deals with challenging situations--like the use of force by the police--and offers a framework for lively classroom discussions and debates.

This topical, accessibly written book moves beyond established critiques to outline a model of positive youth justice: Children First, Offenders Second. Already in use in Wales, the proposed model promotes child-friendly, diversionary, inclusive, engaging, promotional practice and legitimate partnership between children and adults which can serve as a blueprint for other local authorities and countries. Setting out a progressive, positive and principled model of youth justice, the book will appeal to academics, students, practitioners and policy makers seeking to improve working practices and outcomes and will make an important contribution to the debate on youth justice policy.

A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse "Storytelling that can make people understand the racial inequities of the legal system, and...restore the humanity this system has cruelly stripped from its victims.” —New York Times Book Review Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience rep­resenting Black youth in Washington, D.C.’s juve­nile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young peo­ple and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of rac­ism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White Amer­ica and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adoles­cent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools and the depth of police-induced trauma in Black adolescents. Especially in the wake of the recent unprece­dented, worldwide outrage at racial injustice and inequality, The Rage of Innocence is an essential book for our moment.

As they learn about the criminal justice system, students often hear that "nothing works." Enter Making Sense of Criminal Justice--an innovative and insightful textbook that meets the needs of both criminal justice policy courses and undergraduate capstone courses (sometimes called "senior seminars"). Beginning with an outline of the crime control and due process models, G. Larry Mays and Rick Ruddell have organized the book around the three major components of the criminal justice system (police, courts, and corrections). This topical, issues-oriented approach encourages students to think critically about major dilemmas faced by participants in the system, from issues of race and gender to the use of the death penalty. Working from a balanced viewpoint, the authors argue that criminal justice is inherently a political process; they examine strategies that work, those that do not work, and those that represent a gray area between the two extremes. Rather than providing students with "the answers," Mays and Ruddell challenge them to think critically about how we deal with situations--such as the use of force by the police--and offer a framework for lively classroom discussions and debates. End-of-chapter key terms, critical-thinking review questions, and recommended readings enhance students' understanding of the material and aid in test preparation.

What should we do with teenagers who commit crimes? In this book, two leading scholars in law and adolescent development argue that juvenile justice should be grounded in the best available psychological science, which shows that adolescence is a distinctive state of cognitive and emotional development. Although adolescents are not children, they are also not fully responsible adults.

The Youth Criminal Justice Act replaces the Young Offenders Act to provide the legislative framework for a fairer & more effective youth justice system.