Youth And Crime

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.

Building upon the success of the first edition, this second - and substantially revised - edition of Youth Crime and Justice comprises a range of cutting-edge contributions from leading national and international researchers. The book: Situates youth crime and youth justice within historical and social-structural contexts; Critically examines policy and practice trends and their relation to knowledge and ‘evidence’; and Presents a forward looking vision of a rights compliant youth justice with integrity. An authoritative and accessible book, Youth Crime and Justice (2nd ed) provides a coherent, comprehensive and fully up-to-date analysis of contemporary developments and debates. A must for researchers, teachers, students and practitioners.

Following the emerging trend of critical criminology, Youth, Crime, and Society: Issues of Power and Justice adopts a contemporary focus on the connections among youth, crime, and society versus the more traditional examination of youth crime. This critical perspective has two overlapping themes: the way in which the problem of youth crime is constructed, understood, and considered, and the need to address inequalities that are (re)produced by unequal class, race, and gender relations in society. This first edition includes the most recent empirical and theoretical developments in the field, paying particular attention to the Canadian context. It features unique chapters on hot topics in youth and crime, such as young female offenders, Aboriginal youth, street youth, and youth-centered programs. Youth, Crime, and Society aims to create, inspire, and instill a different way of thinking about young people who engage in crime and deviance.

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

In recent years, western societies have experienced a fundamental transformation in the way crime is understood and dealt with. Against the backdrop of a current great interest in narratives in criminology, this book draws on a narrative perspective to explore this transformation. Drawing on data from Germany, the book focuses on changing narratives of youth crime in recent decades and the exact narratives that have been used, abandoned, invented or criticized in order to instil particular understandings of crime and measures to act against it. The author draws upon a wide range of sources, including debates on youth crime in six parliaments from 1970 to 2012; articles on youth crime in four police and six social work journals from 1970 to 2009; and case studies with 15 young defendants who were interviewed before and after their trial and whose trial was observed. In doing so, the author reconstructs narratives over several decades and, overall, reveals a fascinating and multifaceted scope of narratives of youth crime. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of youth crime and justice, as well as criminology, sociology, politics and social work more broadly.

Antisocial and criminal behaviour involving children and young people have been a cause of heightened public concern in England and Wales for more than a quarter of a century. It has been the subject of numerous policy papers, research studies and academic assessments as well as extensive newspaper, radio and television coverage. This has set the context for an ever expanding volume of legislation seeking to amend and improve society's official response. Yet despite a massive injection of resources into the youth justice system the results achieved have been unimpressive, reoffending remains a persistent problem and the general public appears to have little confidence in the youth justice system. The time is ripe therefore for a new look at the problem of youth offending and government and society's response to this. This book accompanies the Report of the Independent Commission on Youth Crime and Antisocial Behaviour, published 2010. In it leading authorities in the field, from a variety of different disciplines, review youth crime and different responses to it, focussing particularly on England and Wales but also analysing for comparative purposes the nature of responses in other parts of the world, especially Canada. It will be essential reading for practitioners, policy makers, students and others with an interest in addressing one of today's most intractable social problems.

This book presents the first comprehensive analysis of the second International Self-Report Delinquency study (ISRD-2). An earlier volume, Juvenile Delinquency in Europe and Beyond (Springer, 2010) focused mainly on the findings with regard to delinquency, victimization and substance use in each of the individual participating ISRD-2 countries. The Many Faces of Youth Crime is based on analysis of the merged data set and has a number of unique features:  The analyses are based on an unusually large number of respondents (about 67,000 7th, 8th and 9th graders) collected by researchers from 31 countries;  It includes reports on the characteristics, experiences and behaviour of first and second generation migrant youth from a variety of cultures;  It is one of the first large-scale international studies asking 12-16 year olds about their victimization experiences (bullying, assault, robbery, theft);  It describes both intriguing differences between young people from different countries and country clusters in the nature and extent of delinquency, victimization and substance use, as well as remarkable cross-national uniformities in delinquency, victimization, and substance use patterns;  A careful comparative analysis of the social responses to offending and victimization adds to our limited knowledge on this important issue;  Detailed chapters on the family, school, neighbourhood, lifestyle and peers provide a rich comparative description of these institutions and their impact on delinquency;  It tests a number of theoretical perspectives (social control, self-control, social disorganization, routine activities/opportunity theory) on a large international sample from a variety of national contexts;  It combines a theoretical focus with a thoughtful consideration of the policy implications of the findings;  An extensive discussion of the ISRD methodology of ‘flexible standardization’ details the challenges of comparative research. The book consists of 12 chapters, which also may be read individually by those interested in particular special topics (for instance, the last chapter should be of special interest to policy makers). The material is presented in such a way that it is accessible to more advanced students, researchers and scholars in a variety of fields, such as criminology, sociology, deviance, social work, comparative methodology, youth studies, substance use studies, and victimology.