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26 books match the query 'Juvenile delinquency'

cover of Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death

Adiós Niño

The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death

Deborah T. Levenson

Duke University Press, 2013

In Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death, Deborah T. Levenson examines transformations in the Guatemalan gangs called Maras from their emergence in the 1980s to the early 2000s. A historical study, Adiós Niño describes how fragile spaces of friendship and exploration turned into rigid and violent ones in which youth, and especially young men, came to employ death as a natural way of living for the short period that they expected to survive. Levenson relates the stark changes in the Maras to global, national, and urban deterioration; transregional gangs that intersect with the drug trade; and the Guatemalan military's obliteration of radical popular movements and of social imaginaries of solidarity. Part of Guatemala City's reconfigured social, political, and cultural milieu, with their members often trapped in Guatemala's growing prison system, the gangs are used to justify remilitarization in Guatemala's contemporary postwar, post-peace era. Portraying the Maras as microcosms of broader tragedies, and pointing out the difficulties faced by those youth who seek to escape the gangs, Levenson poses important questions about the relationship between trauma, memory, and historical agency.
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cover of Before Crips: Fussin', Cussin', and Discussin' among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs

Before Crips

Fussin', Cussin', and Discussin' among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs

John C. Quicker and Akil S. Batani-Khalfani

Temple University Press, 2022

This groundbreaking book opens the door on the missing record of South Los Angeles juvenile gangs. It is the result of the unique friendship that developed between John Quicker and Akil Batani-Khalfani, aka Bird, who collaborated to show how structural marginality transformed hang-out street groups of non-White juveniles into gangs, paving the way for the rise of the infamous Crips and Bloods. Before Crips uses a macro historical analysis to sort through political and economic factors to explain the nature of gang creation.

The authors mine a critical archive, using direct interviews with original gang members as well as theory and literature reviews, to contextualize gang life and gang formation. They discuss (and fuss and cuss about) topics ranging from the criminal economy and conceptions of masculinity to racial and gendered politics and views of violence. Their insider/outsider approach not only illuminates gang values and organization, but what they did and why, and how they grew in a backdrop of inequality and police brutality that came to a head with the 1965 Watts Rebellion.

Providing an essential understanding of early South Los Angeles gang life, Before Crips explains what has remained constant, what has changed, and the roots of the violence that continues.

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cover of COPS AND KIDS: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940

COPS AND KIDS

Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940

David B. Wolcott

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

Juvenile courts were established in the early twentieth century with the ideal of saving young offenders from “delinquency.” Many kids, however, never made it to juvenile court. Their cases were decided by a different agency—the police.

Cops and Kids analyzes how police regulated juvenile behavior in turn-of-the-century America. Focusing on Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit, it examines how police saw their mission, how they dealt with public demands, and how they coped daily with kids. Whereas most scholarship in the field of delinquency has focused on progressive-era reformers who created a separate juvenile justice system, David B. Wolcott’s study looks instead at the complicated, sometimes coercive, relationship between police officers and young offenders. Indeed, Wolcott argues, police officers used their authority in a variety of ways to influence boys’ and girls’ behavior. Prior to the creation of juvenile courts, police officers often disciplined kids by warning and releasing them, keeping them out of courts. Establishing separate juvenile courts, however, encouraged the police to cast a wider net, pulling more young offenders into the new system. While some departments embraced “child-friendly” approaches to policing, others clung to rough-and-tumble methods. By the 1920s and 1930s, many police departments developed new strategies that combined progressive initiatives with tougher law enforcement targeted specifically at growing minority populations.

Cops and Kids illuminates conflicts between reformers and police over the practice of juvenile justice and sheds new light on the origins of lasting tensions between America’s police and urban communities.
 
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cover of Changing Lives: Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy

Changing Lives

Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy

Peter W. Greenwood

University of Chicago Press, 2005

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. 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 here 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.
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cover of Crime and Family: Selected Essays of Joan McCord

Crime and Family

Selected Essays of Joan McCord

Joan McCord, introduction by David Farrington, foreword by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

Temple University Press, 2007

Joan McCord (1930-2004) was one of the most famous, most-respected, and best-loved criminologists of her generation. A brilliant pioneer, Dr. McCord was best known for her work on the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, the first large-scale, longitudinal experimental study in the field of criminology. The study was among the first to demonstrate unintended harmful effects of a well-meaning prevention program. Dr. McCord's most important essays from this groundbreaking research project are among those included in this volume.McCord also co-wrote, edited, or co-edited twelve volumes and authored or co-authored 127 journal articles and book chapters. She wrote across a broad array of subjects, including delinquency, alcoholism, violence, crime prevention, and criminal theory. This book brings her most important and lasting work together in one place for the first time.
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cover of Crime and Justice, Volume 24: Youth Violence

Crime and Justice, Volume 24

Youth Violence

Edited by Michael Tonry and Mark H. Moore

University of Chicago Press Journals, 1998

Youth violence has become one of the most contentious and perplexing issues in current debates on crime policy, not the least because of the sharp increase in violence among young minority males since the mid-1980s.

Featuring articles by leading American and European scholars from many fields, Youth Violence provides a reliable, up-to-date, authoritative and comprehensive overview of policy issues and research developments concerning crime and violence among the young.
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cover of Crime and Justice, Volume 40: Crime and Justice in Scandinavia

Crime and Justice, Volume 40

Crime and Justice in Scandinavia

Edited by Michael Tonry and Tapio Lappi-Seppälä

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2012

Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cure.
Volume 40, Crime and Justice in Scandinavia, offers the most comprehensive and authoritative look ever available at criminal justice policies, practices, and research in the Nordic countries. Topics range from the history of violence through juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, and sentencing to controversial contemporary policies on prostitution, victims, and organized crime. Contributors to this volume include Jon-Gunnar Bernburg, Ville Hinkkanen, Cecilie Høigård, Hanns von Hofer, Charlotta Holmström, Janne Kivivuori, Lars Korsell, Tapio Lappi-Seppälä, Paul Larsson, Martti Lehti, Torkild Hovde Lyngstad, Sven-Axel Månsson, Anita Rönneling, Lise-Lotte Rytterbro, Torbjørn Skardhamar, May-Len Skilbrei, and Henrik Tham.

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cover of Dance for Me When I Die

Dance for Me When I Die

Cristian Alarcón

Duke University Press, 2019

On the morning of February 6, 1999, Buenos Aires police officers shot and killed seventeen-year-old Víctor Manuel Vital, better known as Frente, while he was unarmed, hiding under a table, and trying to surrender. Widely known and respected throughout Buenos Aires's shantytowns for his success as a thief, commitment to a code of honor, and generosity to his community, Frente became a Robin Hood--style legend who, in death, was believed to have the power to make bullets swerve and save gang members from shrapnel. In Dance for Me When I Die—first published in Argentina in 2004 and appearing here in English for the first time—Cristian Alarcón tells the story and legacy of Frente's life and death in the context of the everyday experiences of love and survival, murder and addiction, and crime and courage of those living in the slums. Drawing on interviews with Frente's friends, family, and ex-girlfriends, as well as with local thieves and drug dealers, and having immersed himself in Frente's neighborhood for eighteen months, Alarcón captures the world of the urban poor in all of its complexity and humanity.
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cover of Dead End Kids: Gang Girls and the Boys They Know

Dead End Kids

Gang Girls and the Boys They Know

Mark S. Fleisher

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Dead End Kids exposes both the depravity and the humanity in gang life through the eyes of a teenaged girl named Cara, a member of a Kansas City gang. In this shocking yet compassionate account, Mark Fleisher shows how gang girls’ lives are shaped by poverty, family disorganization, and parental neglect.

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cover of Delinquency in a Birth Cohort

Delinquency in a Birth Cohort

Marvin E. Wolfgang, Robert M. Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin

University of Chicago Press, 1972

"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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cover of Delinquency, crime, and society

Delinquency, crime, and society

James F. Short Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 1978

This thoughtful collection of original work by eminent sociologists and criminologists was compiled to honor Henry D. McKay, the pioneer investigator and collaborator with Clifford R. Shaw. Among the traditions most basic to both continuity and change in criminological research and theory, one of the most important is that associated with Shaw and McKay and the "Chicago school" of urban sociology. So great has been its impact that even the most recent theoretical formulations draw upon it for support or in criticism. Reassessing the "Shaw and McKay tradition," the contributors to this volume pursue critical and emerging issues in the study of crime and delinquency.
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cover of Girls in Trouble with the Law

Girls in Trouble with the Law

Schaffner, Laurie

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In Girls in Trouble with the Law, sociologist Laurie Schaffner takes us inside juvenile detention centers and explores the worlds of the young women incarcerated within. Across the nation, girls of color are disproportionately represented in detention facilities, and many report having experienced physical harm and sexual assaults. For girls, the meaning of these and other factors such as the violence they experience remain undertheorized and below the radar of mainstream sociolegal scholarship. When gender is considered as an analytic category, Schaffner shows how gender is often seen through an outmoded lens.

Offering a critical assessment of what she describes as a gender-insensitive juvenile legal system, Schaffner makes a compelling argument that current policies do not go far enough to empower disadvantaged girls so that communities can assist them in overcoming the social limitations and gender, sexual, and racial/ethnic discrimination that continue to plague young women growing up in contemporary United States.
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cover of Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan

Kamikaze Biker

Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan

Ikuya Sato

University of Chicago Press, 1991

In this firsthand account of high-risk car and motorcycle racing in Japan, Ikuya Sato shows how affluence and consumerism have spawned various experimental and deviant life-styles among youth. Kamikaze Biker offers an intriguing look at a form of delinquency in a country traditionally thought to be devoid of social problems.

"Ikuya Sato's Kamikaze Biker is an exceptionally fine ethnographic analysis of a recurrent form of Japanese collective youth deviance. . . . Sato has contributed a work of value to a wide range of scholarly audiences."—Jack Katz, Contemporary Sociology

"A must for anyone interested in Japan, juvenile delinquency and/or youth behavior in general, or the impact of affluence on society."—Choice

"The volume provides a sophisticated . . . discussion of changes happening in Japanese society in the early 1980s. As such, it serves as a window on the 1990s and beyond."—Ross Mouer, Asian Studies Review

"Kamikaze Biker is a superlative study, one that might help liberate American social science from the simplistic notion that behavior not directly contributing to economic productivity should be summarily dismissed as 'dangerous' and 'deviant.' "—Los Angeles Times Book Review
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cover of LAST ONE OVER THE WALL: The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools

LAST ONE OVER THE WALL

The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools

Jerome G. Miller

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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cover of Lost Causes: Blended Sentencing, Second Chances, and the Texas Youth Commission

Lost Causes

Blended Sentencing, Second Chances, and the Texas Youth Commission

By Chad R. Trulson, Darin R. Haerle, Jonathan W. Caudill, and Matt DeLisi<br>Foreword by James W. Marquart

University of Texas Press, 2016

What should be done with minors who kill, maim, defile, and destroy the lives of others? The state of Texas deals with some of its most serious and violent youthful offenders through “determinate sentencing,” a unique sentencing structure that blends parts of the juvenile and adult justice systems. Once adjudicated via determinate sentencing, offenders are first incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). As they approach age eighteen, they are either transferred to the Texas prison system to serve the remainder of their original determinate sentence or released from TYC into Texas’s communities.

The first long-term study of determinate sentencing in Texas, Lost Causes examines the social and delinquent histories, institutionalization experiences, and release and recidivism outcomes of more than 3,000 serious and violent juvenile offenders who received such sentences between 1987 and 2011. The authors seek to understand the process, outcomes, and consequences of determinate sentencing, which gave serious and violent juvenile offenders one more chance to redeem themselves or to solidify their place as the next generation of adult prisoners in Texas. The book’s findings—that about 70 percent of offenders are released to the community during their most crime-prone years instead of being transferred to the Texas prison system and that about half of those released continue to reoffend for serious crimes—make Lost Causes crucial reading for all students and practitioners of juvenile and criminal justice.

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cover of Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America

Maras

Gang Violence and Security in Central America

Edited by Thomas C. Bruneau, Lucía Dammert, and Elizabeth Skinner

University of Texas Press, 2011

Sensational headlines have publicized the drug trafficking, brutal violence, and other organized crime elements associated with Central America's mara gangs, but there have been few clear-eyed analyses of the history, hierarchies, and future of the mara phenomenon. The first book to look specifically at the Central American gang problem by drawing on the perspectives of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America provides much-needed insight.

These essays trace the development of the gangs, from Mara Salvatrucha to the 18th Street Gang, in Los Angeles and their spread to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua as the result of members' deportation to Central America; there, they account for high homicide rates and threaten the democratic stability of the region. With expertise in areas ranging from political science to law enforcement and human rights, the contributors also explore the spread of mara violence in the United States. Their findings comprise a complete documentation that spans sexualized violence, case studies of individual gangs, economic factors, varied responses to gang violence, the use of intelligence gathering, the limits of state power, and the role of policy makers.

Raising crucial questions for a wide readership, these essays are sure to spark productive international dialogues.

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cover of Nobody's Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic

Nobody's Boy and His Pals

The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic

Hendrik Hartog

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy.

In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra “So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble.” For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their “supervisor,” and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children’s lives changed dramatically.
 
Nobody’s Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins’s story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century. 
 
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cover of Poor Relations: The Children of the State in Illinois, 1818-1990

Poor Relations

The Children of the State in Illinois, 1818-1990

Joan Gittens

University of Illinois Press, 1994

 
       This comprehensive history traces the care of dependent, delinquent,
        and disabled children in Illinois from the early nineteenth century to
        current times, focusing on the dilemmas raised by both public intervention
        and the lack of it. Joan Gittens explores the inadequacies of a system
        that has allowed problems in the public care of children to recur regularly
        but at the same time insists that the state's own history makes it clear
        that the potential for improvements exists.
 
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cover of Race In The Hood: Conflict and Violence among Urban Youth

Race In The Hood

Conflict and Violence among Urban Youth

Howard Pinderhughes

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

A compelling study of the origins of racial conflict and violence in America.

“We’ll just be hanging out, partying. And somebody will say, ‘Hey, let’s go on a mission.’ That’s when you go looking for people who don’t belong in the neighborhood, and you beat ’em up. Sometimes we go out lookin’ for blacks to jump. Sometimes we look for anybody who ain’t supposed to be there.” —Sal, Avenue T Boys

Why are racial conflict and violence among the most enduring problems in American society? Why do some youths express racism violently while others develop tolerance and respect for those who are different? What can we as a society do to foster open-mindedness among children and teenagers? Seeking answers to these questions, Howard Pinderhughes spent two years talking to and studying three groups of New York City adolescents: the predominantly Italian American Avenue T Boys from the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn; a group of African American teenagers from Schomberg Plaza in East Harlem; and a group of Albanian American youth from Pelham Park in the Bronx. Through the voices of these young people, Pinderhughes examines how racial attitudes and identities develop in communities and are then expressed as either tolerance, resulting in territorial cooperation, or hatred, resulting in racial conflict. Race in the Hood draws a picture of young people who grew up in similar class circumstances, facing remarkably similar problems and issues, with one significant difference in their lives-their race or ethnicity. Pinderhughes argues that the key to success in developing racial tolerance lies in the transformation of racialized grassroots ideologies through community and school-based multicultural education. A sophisticated and nuanced study of race relations in New York City, Race in the Hood points to areas of concern and directions for change in all of our communities.
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cover of School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization

School Zone

A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization

Pamela Wilcox, Graham C. Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer

Temple University Press, 2022

Schools should be safe—but they are not always safe for everybody. Authors Pamela Wilcox, Graham Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer studied crime among students located across diverse middle- and high-school settings to investigate why some students engage in delinquency—but others do not—and why some students are more prone to victimization. School Zone focuses on the three key interactional elements—context, victims, and offenders—to understand and explain the impact of common crimes such as theft, weapon carrying, drug possession and the verbal, physical, and sexual harassment of classmates. 

The authors also consider how individual students and schools respond to crime and threats. They analyze the variables that schools can control in planning and practice that explain why some schools have higher crime rates. School Zone uses empirical studies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the patterns and causes of variation in individual- and aggregate-level school-based offending and victimization experiences while also addressing the adequacy of wide-ranging criminological explanations and crime prevention policies. 

In their conclusion, the authors assess the extent to which currently popular strategies of school crime prevention align with what they have discovered through their problem-analysis framework and scientific understandings of student offending and victimization.

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cover of Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously: Developmental Insights and System Challenges

Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously

Developmental Insights and System Challenges

Christopher J. Sullivan

Temple University Press, 2019

The juvenile justice system navigates a high degree of variation in youthful offenders. While professionals with insights about reform and adolescent development consider the risks, the needs, and the patterns of delinquency of youth, too little attention is paid to the responses and practicalities of a system that is both complex and limited in its resources. 

In his essential book, Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously, Christopher Sullivan systematically analyzes key facets of justice-involved youth populations and parses cases to better understand core developmental influences that affect delinquency. He takes a comprehensive look at aspects of the life-course affected by juvenile justice as well as at the juvenile justice system’s operations and its multifaceted mission of delivering both treatment and sanctions to a varied population of youths.

Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously first provides an overview of the youth who encounter the system, then describes its present operations and obstacles, synthesizes relevant developmental insights, and reviews current practices. Drawing on research, theory, and evidence regarding innovative policies, Sullivan offers a series of well-grounded recommendations that suggest how to potentially—and realistically—implement a more effective juvenile justice system that would benefit all.

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cover of The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency

The Child Savers

The Invention of Delinquency

Anthony M. Platt

University of Chicago Press, 1977

Anthony Platt's study, a chronicle of the child-saving movement and the juvenile court, explodes myth after myth about the benign character of both. The movement is described not as an effort to liberate and dignify youth but as a punitive, romantic, and intrusive effort to control the lives of lower-class urban adolescents and to maintain their dependent status. In so doing Platt analyzes early views of criminal behavior, the origins of the reformatory system, the social values of middle-class reformers, and the handling of youthful offenders before and after the creation of separate juvenile jurisdictions.

In this second, enlarged edition of The Child Savers, the author has added a new introduction and postscript in which he critically reflects upon his original analysis, suggests new ways of thinking about the child-saving movement, and summarizes recent developments in the juvenile justice system.
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cover of The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency

The Child Savers

The Invention of Delinquency

Platt, Anthony M

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Hailed as a definitive analytical and historical study of the juvenile justice system, this 40th anniversary edition of The Child Savers features a new essay by Anthony M. Platt that highlights recent directions in the field, as well as a critique of his original text.

Focusing on social reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Platt's principal argument is that the "child savers" movement was not an effort to liberate and dignify youth but, instead, a punitive and intrusive attempt to control the lives of working-class urban adolescents. This expanded edition provides a renewed and distinguished contribution by placing it in historical context through insightful commentaries from cross-disciplinary academics, along with an essay by Miroslava Chávez-García examining how Platt's influential study has impacted many of the central arguments social scientists and historians face today.

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cover of The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story

The Jack-Roller

A Delinquent Boy's Own Story

Clifford R. Shaw

University of Chicago Press, 1966

The Jack-Roller tells the story of Stanley, a pseudonym Clifford Shaw gave to his informant and co-author, Michael Peter Majer. Stanley was sixteen years old when Shaw met him in 1923 and had recently been released from the Illinois State Reformatory at Pontiac, after serving a one-year sentence for burglary and jack-rolling (mugging), 

Vivid, authentic, this is the autobiography of a delinquent—his experiences, influences, attitudes, and values. The Jack-Roller helped to establish the life-history or "own story" as an important instrument of sociological research. The book remains as relevant today to the study and treatment of juvenile delinquency and maladjustment as it was when originally published in 1930.

 
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cover of Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People

Trapped in a Vice

The Consequences of Confinement for Young People

Cox, Alexandra

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Winner of the 2019 Outstanding Book Award - ASC DCCSJ​

Trapped in a Vice explores the consequences of a juvenile justice system that is aimed at promoting change in the lives of young people, yet ultimately relies upon tools and strategies that enmesh them in a system that they struggle to move beyond. The system, rather than the crimes themselves, is the vice. Trapped in a Vice explores the lives of the young people and adults in the criminal justice system, revealing the ways that they struggle to manage the expectations of that system; these stories from the ground level of the justice system demonstrate the complex exchange of policy and practice.  
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cover of Youth, Crime, and Justice: A Global Inquiry

Youth, Crime, and Justice

A Global Inquiry

Hartjen, Clayton A

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Close to half of the world’s population is below the age of criminal jurisdiction in most countries. Many of these young people are living in poverty and under totalitarian regimes. Given their deprived and often abject circumstances, it is not surprising that many of them become involved in crime.

            In Youth, Crime, and Justice, Clayton A. Hartjen provides a broad overview of juvenile delinquency: how it manifests itself around the world and how societies respond to misconduct among their children. Taking a global, rather than country-specific approach, chapters focus on topics that range from juvenile laws and the correction of child offenders to the abuse, exploitation, and victimization of young people. Hartjen includes specific examples from the United States, Australia, Spain, Switzerland, New Zealand, Japan, India, Egypt, and elsewhere as he sorts through the various definitions of “delinquent” and explores the differences in behavior that contribute to these classifications. Most importantly, his in-depth and comparative look at judicial systems worldwide raises questions about how young offenders should be “corrected” and how much fault can be laid on misbehaving youths acting out against the very societies that produced them.

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