The New Politics of Youth Crime : Discipline or Solidarity?

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 that threatens to deepen the problems it purports to solve. Analyzing 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 problems of youth crime in Europe. Booknews 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- -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) "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. Analyzing 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 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. Analysing the profound changes in UK youth crime in the 1980s, this text posits the French Social Prevention Initiative of the 1980s as an alternative model for a genuinely 'joined up', social democratic response to the problem of youth crime