Even though youth crime rates have fallen since the mid-1990s, public fear and political rhetoric over the issue have heightened. The Columbine shootings and other sensational incidents add to the furor. Often overlooked are the underlying problems of child poverty, social disadvantage, and the pitfalls inherent to adolescent decisionmaking that contribute to youth crime. From a policy standpoint, adolescent offenders are caught in the crossfire between nurturance of youth and punishment of criminals, between rehabilitation and "get tough" pronouncements. In the midst of this emotional debate, the National Research Council's Panel on Juvenile Crime steps forward with an authoritative review of the best available data and analysis. Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents recommendations for addressing the many aspects of America's youth crime problem. This timely release discusses patterns and trends in crimes by children and adolescentsâ€"trends revealed by arrest data, victim reports, and other sources; youth crime within general crime; and race and sex disparities. The book explores desistanceâ€"the probability that delinquency or criminal activities decrease with ageâ€"and evaluates different approaches to predicting future crime rates. Why do young people turn to delinquency? Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents what we know and what we urgently need to find out about contributing factors, ranging from prenatal care, differences in temperament, and family influences to the role of peer relationships, the impact of the school policies toward delinquency, and the broader influences of the neighborhood and community. Equally important, this book examines a range of solutions: Prevention and intervention efforts directed to individuals, peer groups, and families, as well as day care-, school- and community-based initiatives. Intervention within the juvenile justice system. Role of the police. Processing and detention of youth offenders. Transferring youths to the adult judicial system. Residential placement of juveniles. The book includes background on the American juvenile court system, useful comparisons with the juvenile justice systems of other nations, and other important information for assessing this problem.

Juvenile Justice and Delinquency brings into focus the causes of delinquency and provides students with a broad, up-to-date review of the latest research, statistical data, theories, and court decisions in the U.S. juvenile justice system. Author Barry Krisberg writes from a research-based approach which offers students pragmatic solutions to problems within the system—focusing on the reformative power of redemptive justice. Students will take away a foundational understanding of the current policies and issues shaping the juvenile justice system and practical strategies for helping juveniles improve and move their lives in a more positive direction.

In Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency, Terence P. Thornberry and his contributors show that criminal behavior is not a static human attribute, but ebbs and flows over the life course of the individual. Criminal behavior tends to follow a distinct psychological pattern. It is relatively uncommon during childhood, is initiated by most offenders during adolescence, flourishes during late adolescence and early childhood, and usually diminishes or disappears by the mid-twenties. This pattern is not characteristic of all people--some never commit crimes and others become career criminals--but it is a general description of the developmental pattern of criminal offenders. This pattern has profound implications for theories of crime and delinquency. Not only does it explain initiation into, maintenance of, and desistance from involvement in crime, it offers insight into why crime flourishes during adolescence. Traditional theories of crime and delinquency have often failed to distinguish among different phases of criminal careers. They tend to ignore developmental changes that occur across a person's life course, changes that coincide with and can explain the causes and patterns of criminal behavior. This paperback edition of the seventh volume of the distinguished series Advances in Criminological Theory moves us from static identifications of the criminal by presenting a broad range of developmental explanations of crime. Each contributor articulates a developmental or life course perspective in explaining how people become involved in delinquency and crime. Each covers a wide range of theoretical territory and reveals how a developmental perspective enhances the explanatory power of traditional theories of crime and delinquency. This volume is an invaluable tool for criminologists, sociologists, psychologists, and other professionals seeking to teach how crime and violence can be understood in our culture.

This is a book about Edwin H. Sutherland's theory of differ ential association. I received my Ph. D. from Indiana University, where I worked with Sutherland, and the volume is made up principally of my writings on differential association during the years 1952-1963. However, the volume is neither a festschrift nor a book of reprints. The original materials have in most cases been quite severely edited in order to give the volume coherence and in order to minimize repetition and redundancy. For example, portions of one journal article appear in Chapters I, IV and V; parts of a chapter published in a recent book appear in Chapters I, II and III; and Chapter IX is composed of two inter-related articles, published eight years apart. Chapter I has not appeared elsewhere in its present form, but most of it consists of snippets culled from several of my articles and books and woven together in new form. The book is intended primarily for non-American readers, who on the whole are not as familiar with Sutherland's theory (or with other sociological and social psychological theories about delinquency, crime and corrections) as are Americans. Yet at least a nodding acquaintance with Sutherland's work is becoming increasingly necessary to an intelligent reading of the American literature in criminology.

This slim volume offers a comprehensive survey of the major criminological and delinquency theories including their philosophical foundations and policy implications. The text can be used as either a primary text or as a supplement for other texts, anthologies, or collections of journal articles.

Much of a society’s resources are devoted to dealing with, or preparing for the possibility of, crime. The dominance of concerns about crime also hint at the broader implications that offending has for many different facets of society. They suggest that rather than being an outlawed subset of social activity, crime is an integrated aspect of societal processes. This book reviews some of the direct and indirect social impacts of criminality, proposing that this is worthwhile, not just in terms of understanding crime, but also because of how it elucidates more general social considerations. A range of studies that examine the interactions between crime and society are brought together, drawing on a wide range of countries and cultures including India, Israel, Nigeria, Turkey, and the USA, as well as the UK and Ireland. They include contributions from many different social science disciplines, which, taken together, demonstrate that the implicit and direct impact of crime is very widespread indeed. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.