NCJ Number
216889
Editor(s)
Barry Goldson,
John Muncie
Date Published
2006
Length
252 pages
Annotation
This book provides an overview of youth crime and youth justice and attempts to critically assess the relation between evidence and policy as a means of understanding youth crime and justice.
Abstract
Divided into three parts, this book, utilizing leading national and international academic scholars, assesses the relation between evidence and policy as a means of understanding youth crime and justice. Part 1 situates youth crime and youth justice within historical and social-structural contexts. The chapters in part 1 reestablish the importance of historical memory for understanding the present and the primary significance of structural relations and social divisions for conceptualizing: (1) the adverse socio-economic and cultural contexts within which identifiable groups of children and young people are grouped in advanced industrial societies; (2) the complex material conditions within which youth crime is located; and (3) the means by which disadvantaged young people are regulated, controlled, and even criminalized by youth justice agencies. Part 2 engages explicitly with the symbolic domination of evidenced-based policy within dominant youth justice discourse, and it subjects both the evidence and its relation to policy and critical assessment. Part 3 attempts to integrate many of the themes that run through the book. It is argued that youth justice itself is a contested and multi-faceted construct, and that youth justice systems comprise settlements of multiple thematic importance. Index