Abstract
A Political Ecology of Youth and Crime offers a critique of the increased attention to youth (mis)behavior over the past several decades, which has granted power and technology to agencies and institutions that target “problematic” young people. Alan France, Dorothy Bottrell, and Derrick Armstrong suggest dominant public, political, and scholarly discourse on the place of crime in young people’s lives has been largely insufficient. Their political-ecological approach “recognizes that the everyday ‘worlds’ that young people engage in, and interact with, are a product of external ‘political’ forces evident at a number of levels (within micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems)” (p. 5).
The empirical chapters draw from 110 interviews and 13 in-depth case studies of youth from four of England’s poorest neighborhoods. These data serve as the basis of a grounded sociological analysis of young people’s own accounts as they relate to place and space (Chapter Two), the fruitlessness of “criminal career” and “pathways” theories (Chapter Three), experiences with peer groups in relation to conflict within and outside of school (Chapter Four), the link between educational failure and crime (Chapter Five), relationships at home and with family (Chapter Six), and being “in care,” a foreign euphemism to many U.S. readers meaning under state supervision (Chapter Seven). All of the chapters do well at demonstrating the “nested” ecological relationships influencing youth delinquency, but, in my opinion, Chapter Four is the richest and most nuanced at achieving this task.
As a whole, the book offers a powerful analytic for recognizing the social and political processes that structure young people’s development. Specifically, the book offers an intervention that breaks from individualized and psychologized accounts of this relationship—frameworks that are prevalent in mainstream criminological theory—making it highly recommendable.