Political Ecology of Youth and Crime

This book proposes a new conceptual framework for theorising young people's relationship with crime. It emerges from a critique of the narrow approach advocated by developmental criminology and argues for an analysis that recognises and includes the important contribution that the young themselves can make to the theorising and understanding of their relationship with crime. Explicitly using the voices of a group of working class young people who are defined as 'a social problem', this approach emphasises how criminal identities and pathways are strongly influenced by the interactions embedded in political ecological systems and relationships. Drawing upon the work of the social psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this book explores young people's 'nested' and 'political' ecological relationships with crime. A Political Ecology of Youth and Crime examines the impacts of these relationships through an empirical investigation of the important 'places' and 'spaces' in young people's lives; in their social relationships with peers and family members; and within formal institutional systems such as education, youth justice and social care. This book makes an important new contribution to how we understand the relationship between youth and crime in the contexts of sociology, criminology, social psychology and education.