Youth and Crime
Student Resources
Youth and Social Policy: Control, Regulation and Governance
Annotated Further Reading
There is no existing work which explicitly draws on theories of social control and governance to explore the regulatory practices embedded in social policy for young people, but Mizen, P. (2004) The Changing State of Youth. Basingstoke: Palgrave. is an authoritative overview of how New Labour reforms in education, training, work, social security and youth justice continued to centre ‘youth’ in the political management of capitalist societies.
For an empirical overview of how various youth policies in the 1990s (education, training, housing and criminal justice) fermented poverty and disaffection amongst the young, see Williamson, H. (1993) ‘Youth policy in the United Kingdom and the marginalization of young people’, Youth and Policy, 40: 33–48.
Coles, B. (1995) Youth and Social Policy. London: UCL Press. and
Furlong, A. and Cartmel, F. (1997) Young People and Social Change. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Both cover much the same ground and in more detail, the former working with the concept of ‘career’, the latter with the concept of ‘risk’.
Taylor, I. (1999) Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies. Cambridge: Polity.
Provides an insightful analysis of how the material outcomes of market societies regulate the social circumstances and behaviours of the young.
For incisive critical analyses of the concept of social exclusion, see:
Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society. London: Sage.
Young, J. (2007) The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London: Sage.
Chapter 3 - ‘The Sociology of Vindictiveness and the Criminology of Transgression’
and
Levitas, R. (1998) The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour. London: Macmillan.
The journal Youth and Policy provides a useful critical analysis of most of the relevant issues.
Weblinks
A daily news update on all matters relating to children and young people including health, education, childcare, youth work and youth justice.
A UK site for statistics on poverty and social exclusion.
www.jrf.org.uk/work/workarea/child-poverty
Details research on child poverty carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Site of the Child Poverty Action Group campaigning for the abolition of child poverty in the UK.
Site of the NCH action for children, a charity which supports children and young people affected by poverty, disability, abuse or neglect.
The Coram Children’s Legal Centre is a charitable organization established in 1981 and based at the University of Essex, UK. It is home to the monthly journal Childright.
This website is part of a major research project, Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE: UK), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.