Youth Justice is a key area of the current governments criminal justice policy in England and Wales. It has been the subject of an inordinate amount of recent legislation seeking to enhance the criminal courts powers to punish and prevent offending and re-offending by young people. This legislation attempts to prevent offending through criminal justice measures and there is little attempt to use non-criminal or civil law procedures to achieve the same result. This book seeks to challenge that focus and to question why delinquency in young people has been so firmly criminalized in this jurisdiction. The book addresses the consequences of criminalization in terms of the effectiveness of the measures used as well as the implications for the social construction of youth and childhood and our attitudes towards the young. Criminalization of young peoples behaviour results in them being labeled as criminal,losing identity as an individual, losing their childhood through the process of taking adult responsibility for their actions and, in policy terms, becoming viewed as a crime problem rather than as a product of failing social policy regarding employment, education and youth culture. At a society level it is contended that the identification of young people with criminal activity and the negative public image that results creates a culture of fear and distrust which may in turn create further possibilities for criminalization of their behaviour. A comparative perspective in this work examines welfare-based responses to youth crime in other European jurisdictions and questions whether the criminal justice process is an appropriate context in which to deal with young peoples problematic behaviour. This book has been shortlisted for the 2007 SLSA Book Prize.

Howard Williamson's 'Five Years' was a ground-breaking study of youth, poverty and crime in the 1970s. At its close, the boys he interviewed were left with few prospects and bleak futures. Twenty-five years later, Williamson returns to find out the sort of men these boys have become and narrates their stories in this extraordinary book.Of the original group of sixty-seven boys, seven are dead -- not one of natural causes. Williamson tracked down half of those remaining. Here they tell of their personal, family and social relationships, legal and illegal work, their experiences of the criminal justice system, and money. Contrary to what one might expect, their lives are startlingly diverse.The Milltown Boys Revisited is a riveting account of life on the edge during the Thatcher and Blair governments. It tells stories of dignity, human betterment and escape, of fatalism on the margins of criminal and drug cultures, and also of getting by in difficult circumstances. It is as much a celebration of individual resilience as an account of risk and vulnerability in the lives of the dispossessed.

As juvenile justice dominates the headlines, the time has come to reexamine the history of this controversial institution. In Transforming Juvenile Justice, Steven L. Schlossman traces the evolution of the idea that young lawbreakers, or potential lawbreakers, merit special treatment. He closely examines the Milwaukee Juvenile Court and the Wisconsin State Reform School to reveal how Progressive theory-the belief that rehabilitation and careful oversight should replace punishment of delinquent youth-played out in practice. Since its original publication in 1977, Schlossman's history of the juvenile justice system contributed to the debate on the delinquency problem and remains a landmark study today. In an engaging new introduction for this fresh edition of his classic, Schlossman reveals his sources of inspiration and relates his discovery of the rare records that offered an exclusive glimpse into the Milwaukee court's day-to-day operations. His account of the changing definitions of delinquency and reformers' attempts to remedy it offers insights on dilemmas that continue to plague American society.

Criminal justice professionals and the media have noted the rise of juvenile crime rates nationwide and a growing surge in youth violence. This in turn has highlighted the debate over juvenile transfers to adult courts. Proponents of treating violent juvenile offenders as adults argue that juvenile offenders should be held accountable and receive punishment that is appropriate to the seriousness of their offences and that society must be protected by their removal from law abiding communities. They urge that young offenders must be held accountable for both lesser and more serious crimes, especially when the former offences, if unpunished, may lead offenders to commit the latter. Opponents of treating violent juveniles offenders as adults argue that harsh punishment of juvenile offenders is counterproductive, creating recidivism. Their contention is that youths who are committing crimes should still be tried in juvenile courts rather than adult courts, for a greater effect. This informative book presents all the current issues, problems, ideas, as well as some background on the controversies surrounding juvenile crime.

Internationally, there is now an acceptance of the need to develop new strategies in criminal justice which reflect restorative justice principles. At the same time, theory, research and practice in restorative justice is making rapid advances. This book provides an up to date and critical account of recent developments. It describes the practice of restorative justice with respect to young offenders in a number of jurisdictions - Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and various continental European countries. Research findings on the three most common formats - conferencing, victims offender education and circles - are presented. Critical issues for the future development of restorative justice are identified. Two main themes run through the collection - the potential of restorative processes to transform criminal justice processes and the potential for aboriginal or indigenous communities to impact on conventional processes. Contributors include active researchers and leading theorists from around the world. '.. provides an up-to-date and critical account of recent developments in the rapidly advancing field of restorative justice..a thought provoking collection of papers from researchers and leading theorists from around the world. It will be of interest to all those who work in the youth justice field.' Childright '...[an] exceptional set of papers...their analyses are excellent.' Howard Journal of Criminal Justice

An uncompromising look at the rise of violent crimes by America's children and the steps parents, teachers and mentors can take to save our children.

From the summer of 1972 through 1975, Kenneth Wooden visited correctional facilities in thirty states where juveniles between the ages of five and sixteen were being held. During his research he uncovered an astoundingly high incidence of emotional and physical abuse, torture, and commercial exploitation of the children by their keepers, individuals who received public funds to care for them. After observing the brutal treatment of these youths, a significant number of whom were not criminals but runaways or mentally disabled, Wooden described the conditions in which these children lived in Weeping in the Playtime of Others.

`An excellent reader. It contains all the basic ingredients of a superb teaching book with the qualities of a thought-provoking text.... Should be required reading for all students of criminal justice policy and it will be a valuable teaching resource for all those involved in the delivery of courses on young people, justice and punishment' - Punishment and Society

`This is a valuable student text; carefully collated and with an abuntant array of material... and will surely become a widely used course reader. For the practitioner and general reader it is a book to dip into, a means to access debates and remind oneself of the ebb and flow of policy' - Youth Justice

Youth Justice brings together for the first time the most influential international contributors to the emergent field of youth justice studies.

Youth Justice provides:

· a critical introduction to the intellectual reframing of the history, theory, policy and practice of youth justice.

· an essential resource of key debates and controversies from across the range of disciplines engaged in the study of youth in the social sciences

· editorial essays at the beginning of each substantive section of the

volume

· specially commissioned chapters at the end of each section, which place the readings in their theoretical and historical context.

The Reader is the set text for The Open University course, Youth Justice, Penality and Social Control (D864).

What is happening to the social fabric of America? Children are afraid to go to school for fear that another lunatic will decide to shoot up the student body. School administrators refuse to acknowledge that school security is their responsibility. Parents ignore their children who can access internet at the flick of a wrist to find out detailed instructions on bomb assembly. TV movies and video games encourage violence. The NRA says guns are not the problem -- people are. Meanwhile, the country is led by a president no one will ever mistake for a role model nor can trust to ever tell the truth about anything. Given this atrocious scenario, no one should be surprised that youth violence lurks behind every school house door.

This easy-to-use bibliography groups over 1500 citations, many with abstracts from the journal literature, books, government reports and edited collections, under the headings of: School Safety, School Violence, Guns and Youth, Internet Violence, Parental Neglect and Societal Responsibility.

This text is part of the Readings in Crime and Punishment series, a line of readers covering many aspects of the criminal justice, police, and correctional systems. In Readings in Juvenile Justice Administration, Barry C. Feld selects articles written by noted experts in the field, examining the juvenile justice system, focusing on juvenile courts, and the judicial, administrative, and correctional systems for the social control of criminal and non-criminal juvenile offenders. Feld considers legal and sociological aspects of juvenile justice administration, concentrating on causes of youth crime and development of juvenile offenders. Ideal for courses in the juvenile justice system and juvenile justice.

This work examines the links between educational failure and future offending behaviour. It contains the stories of inmates' schooldays told in their own words as they try to answer the question "could anything have been done to prevent you being in custody now?" The book ends with suggestions on action schools might take towards redressing social, cultural and educational disadvantage and intervening to help limit future offending behaviour.

Young minority men are often portrayed in popular media as victims of poverty and discrimination. A Dream Denied delves deeper, investigating the social and cultural implications of the "American dream" narrative for young minority men in the juvenile justice systems in Boston and Chicago. This book connects young male offenders' cycles of desistance and recidivism with normative assumptions about success and failure in American society, exposing a tragic disconnect between structural reality and juvenile justice policy. This book challenges us to reconsider how American society relates to its most vulnerable members, how it responds to their personal failures, and how it promises them a better future.

Miller's Children is a passionate and comprehensive look at the human consequences of the US Supreme Court's decision in the case of Miller v. Alabama, which outlaws mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile murderers. The decision to apply the law retroactively to other cases has provided hope to those convicted of murders as teenagers and had been incarcerated with the expectation that they would never leave prison until their own death as incarcerated adults. Psychological expert witness James Garbarino shares his fieldwork in more than forty resentencing cases of juveniles affected by the Miller decision. Providing a wide-ranging review of current research on human development in adolescence and early adulthood, he shows how studies reveal the adolescent mind's keen ability for malleability, suggesting the true potential for rehabilitation. Garbarino focuses on how and why some convicted teenage murderers have been able to accomplish dramatic rehabilitation and transformation, emphasizing the role of education, reflection, mentoring, and spiritual development. With a deft hand, he shows us the prisoners' world that is filled, first and foremost, with stories of hope amid despair, and moral and psychological recovery in the face of developmental insult and damage.

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.

It is often said that a teen "old enough to do the crime is old enough to do the time", but are teens really mature and capable enough to participate fully and fairly in adult criminal court? In this book - the fruit of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice - a wide range of leaders in developmental psychology and law combine their expertise to investigate the current limitations on our youth policy. The first part of the book establishes a developmental perspective on juvenile justice; the second and third parts then apply this perspective to issues of adolescents' capacities as trial defendants and to questions of legal culpability. Underlying the entire work is the assumption that an enlightened juvenile justice system cannot ignore the developmental psychological realities of adolescence. Not only a state-of-the-art assessment of the conceptual and empirical issues in the forensic assessment of youth, "Youth on Trial" is also a call to reintroduce sound, humane public policy into our justice system.

In the context of two hundred years of American colonial control in the Pacific, Katherine Irwin and Karen Umemoto shed light on the experiences of today's inner city and rural girls and boys in Hawaii who face racism, sexism, poverty, and political neglect. Basing their book on nine years of ethnographic research, the authors highlight how legacies of injustice endure, prompting teens to fight for dignity and the chance to thrive in America, a nation that the youth describe as inherently "jacked up"-rigged-and "unjust." While the story begins with the youth battling multiple contingencies, it ends on a hopeful note with many of the teens overcoming numerous hardships, often with the guidance of steadfast, caring adults.

One of the most astonishing aspects of juvenile crime is how little is known about the impact of the policies and programs put in place to fight it. As a result of this almost complete absence of evaluation, the most commonly used strategies and programs for combating juvenile delinquency problems primarily rely on intuition and fads. Fortunately, as a result of the promising new research documented in "Changing Lives," these deficiencies in our juvenile justice system might quickly be remedied.Peter W. Greenwood here demonstrates that as crimes rates have fallen, researchers have identified more connections between specific risk factors and criminal behavior, while program developers have discovered a wide array of innovative interventions. The result of all this activity, he reveals, has been the revelation of a few prevention models that reduce crime much more cost-effectively than popular approaches such as tougher sentencing, D.A.R.E., boot camps, and "scared straight" programs. "Changing Lives "expertly presents the most promising of these prevention programs, their histories, the quality of evidence to support their effectiveness, the public policy programs involved in bringing them into wider use, and the potential for investments and developmental research to increase the range and quality of programs. Combining compassion with common sense and clear prose with the most cutting-edge research available on the efficiency of delinquency prevention programs, "Changing Lives" should be read by any policymaker, attorney, criminologist, social worker, psychologist, or other worker faced with the task of trying to help rehabilitate young offenders.

Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, difficult and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile reformatory system. The book breaks new ground in crime research, speaking to pressing present-day concerns around child poverty and youth justice, and resonating with a powerful public fascination for family history. Using innovative digital methods to unlock the Victorian life course, the authors have reconstructed the lives, families and neighbourhoods of 500 children living within, or at the margins of, the early English juvenile reformatory system. Four hundred of them were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north west of England from courts around the UK over a fifty-year period from the 1860s onwards. Young Criminal Lives is based on one of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind. For the first time, these children can be followed on their journey in and out of reform and then though their adulthood and old age. The book centres on institutions celebrated in this period for their pioneering new approaches to child welfare and others that were investigated for cruelty and scandal. Both were typical of the new kind of state-certified provision offered, from the 1850s on, to children who had committed criminal acts, or who were considered 'vulnerable' to predation, poverty and the 'inheritance' of criminal dispositions. The notion that interventions can and must be evaluated in order to determine 'what works' now dominates public policy. But how did Victorian and Edwardian policy-makers and practitioners deal with this question? By what criteria, and on the basis of what kinds of evidence, did they judge their own successes and failures? Young Criminal Lives ends with a critical review of the historical rise of evidence-based policy-making within criminal justice. It will appeal to scholars and students of crime and penal policy, criminologists, sociologists, and social policy researchers and practitioners in youth justice and child protection.

This unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries uses one of the harshest states - California - as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives, "States of Delinquency" is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry. Miroslava Chavez-Garcia examines the ideologies and practices used by state institutions as they began to replace families and communities in punishing youth, and explores the application of science and pseudo-scientific research in the disproportionate classification of youths of color as degenerate. She also shows how these boys and girls, and their families, resisted increasingly harsh treatment and various kinds of abuse, including sterilization.

Administering justice to juvenile offenders has largely been the domain of the states, and as a result of this the laws that pertain to juvenile offenders can vary widely from state to state. There is no federal juvenile justice system. Although the federal government does not play a direct role in administering juvenile justice, in the 1960s, the federal government began establishing federal juvenile justice agencies and grant programs in order to influence the states' juvenile justice systems. The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) of 1974 created many of the federal entities and grant programs that continue to operate today, including the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the State Formula Grants Program. This book analyses the current federal legislation that influences the state juvenile justice systems. Although the book provides some background information on the evolution of juvenile justice in the United States, the main focus of the book is the major federal legislation that impacts state juvenile justice systems, including the JJDPA. It also provides a bibliography of a comprehensive list of resources about the field of juvenile justice. Each annotation explains what the item is about, and citations are organised into the following areas: courts; juvenile assessment; assessment tools; programs; programs for young women; facilities; training; websites; and juvenile sex offenders.

There are multiple reasons to prevent juveniles from becoming delinquent or continuing to engage in delinquent behaviour. The most obvious reason is that delinquency puts youth at risk for substance abuse and delinquency, school drop-out, gang involvement, criminality, and mental health challenges. Youth engaging in delinquent behaviours are also vulnerable to physical injury, early pregnancy, domestic violence and sexual assault. To address issues of juvenile delinquency, this book describes various youth and family risk and protective factors associated with delinquency and provides a description of various family-oriented treatment options for preventing and treating youth violence and aggression. The authors also examine how sociometric status influences childhood bullying, aggressive behaviour and victimisation. Special attention is given to the affect of sociometric neglect and rejection on child development. In addition, this book summarises the transformation of youth gangs and violence associated with them, the basis of interventions to reduce youth gang affiliation and aggression in these different eras. To conclude, implications for the prevention and treatment of juvenile crime are presented, as well as recommendations for extinguishing violent and aggressive beliefs and behaviours in children.

Administering justice to juvenile offenders has largely been the domain of the states, and as a result of this the laws that pertain to juvenile offenders can vary widely from state to state. This book analyses the current federal legislation that impacts the state juvenile justice systems. It also provides an overview of research on the deterrent effects of transferring youth from juvenile to criminal courts. In addition, this book examines juvenile suicides that occurred in confinement. It describes the demographic characteristics and social history of victims and examines the characteristics of the facilities in which the suicides took place. Drawing on this data, the researchers offer recommendations to prevent suicides in juvenile facilities. Moreover, this book analyses the prevalence and overlap of substance-related behaviours among youth, with comparisons by age group, gender and race/ethnicity. The analysis shows that a youth who engages in one substance-related behaviour is much more likely to engage in another. This book presents information that can help the juvenile justice system detect youth with psychiatric disorders and respond with an integrated system of services. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

Delinquency is an antisocial misdeed in violation of the law by a minor. This book examines the correlation between family environment and juvenile delinquency and criminality. Also discussed are the social factors that influence delinquent behaviour. The unresolved and contentious issue of different explanatory "types" or "etiological patterns" among delinquents and the conflict this creates for advocates of "general theory" in delinquency are also addressed. Additional chapters look at adolescent religiosity as a factor for delinquency, psychopathic tendencies and causes of delinquency from a biosocial criminological perspective.

"Hidden Truth" takes the reader inside a Rhode Island juvenile prison to explore broader questions of how poor, disenfranchised young men come to terms with masculinity and identity. Adam D. Reich, who worked with inmates to produce a newspaper, writes vividly and memorably about the young men he came to know, and in the process extends theories of masculinity, crime, and social reproduction into a provocative new paradigm. Reich suggests that young men's participation in crime constitutes a game through which they achieve 'outsider masculinity'. Once in prison these same youths are forced to reconcile their criminal practices with a new game and new 'insider masculinity' enforced by guards and administrators.

""Delinquency in a Birth Cohort "is a turning point in criminological research in the United States," writes Norval Morris in his foreword. "What has been completely lacking until this book is an analysis of delinquency in a substantial cohort of youths, the cohort being defined other than by their contact with any part of the criminal justice system."
This study of a birth cohort was not originally meant to be etiological or predictive. Yet the data bearing on this cohort of nearly ten thousand boys born in 1945 and living in Philadelphia gave rise to a model for prediction of delinquency, and thus to the possibility for more efficient planning of programs for intervention. It is expert research yielding significant applications and, though largely statistical, the analysis is accessible to readers without mathematical training.
"No serious scholar of the methods of preventing and treating juvenile delinquency can properly ignore this book."--LeRoy L. Lamborn, "Law Library Journal"
"The magnitude of [this] study is awesome. . . . It should be a useful guide for anyone interested in the intricacies of cohort analysis."--Gary F. Jensen, "American Journal of Sociology"
"A book the student of juvenile delinquency will find invaluable."--"Criminologist
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