The New Politics of Youth Crime: Discipline or Solidarity?

by J. Pitts

Overview

The New Politics of Youth Crime argues that the centrality of 'law and order' to the New Labour project has generated a youth justice strategy which threatens to deepen the problems it purports to solve. Analysing the profound changes in UK youth crime in the 1980s, this book posits the French Social Prevention Initiative of the 1980s as an alternative model for a genuinely 'joined-up', social democratic response to the increasingly complex problem of youth crime in Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333692011
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	03/13/2001
Edition description:	2001
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

JOHN PITTS is Vauxhall Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Luton. His publications include The Politics of Juvenile Crime (1988), Working with Young Offenders (1999), Developing Services for Young People in Crisis (1991), Preventing School Bullying (1995) and Positive Residential Practice: Learning the Lessons of the 1990s. John Pitts is chair of the board of Social Work in Europe, contributes the Youth Crime and Youth Justice section to the journal Research Matters and is a board member of the UNESCO journal Juvenile Justice Worldwide.

Table of Contents

Dedication List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements The Disciplinary Tradition Things Can Only Get Better Hard Labour The Confrontation with Consequences The Development of Discernment After the Goldrush The Erosion of Solidarity A Tale of Two Housing Estates Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Pitts (U. of Luton) compares government responses to youth crime and disorder in the UK and France. In Britain, he finds that society is being ill-served by a "politics of nostalgia" and blame in which, "faced with future uncertainty, the contemporary political reflex is to turn to the past for a template." However, he writes, "the seismic social and cultural shifts through which we are living pose crucial questions about how we are to absorb a rising generation of children and young people whose marginality vis-<`a>-vis the social and economic mainstream may be paralleled by their marginality to a parental culture which cannot equip them for survival in the radically changed world they have been forced to enter." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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