UNDERSTANDING YOUTH AND CRIME
UNDERSTANDING YOUTH AND CRIME. BY S. BROWN (BUCKINGHAM, OPEN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998, L17.99) Sheila Brown's 'Understanding Youth and Crime' illustrates effectively the history of criminology spanning from the 18th century to present day, and also, more importantly, the causes and effects of everyday stereotypes associated with youth crime. It begins explaining how society builds up stereotypes of people based on age, and that when people deviate from these expected stereotypes, 'a sense of social order is subtly outraged.' These stereotypes are culturally produced and sustained through the media, academia, politics, life, history and other environmental factors. Henceforth, these socially produced notions of age-appropriate behaviour and identity are sustained. These stereotypes can be said to be representations not of how we do feel, but rather how we should instinctively feel. She goes on to analyse crimes in terms of age - those associated with childhood, middle age and elderly criminals, questioning why and how crimes are committed and what causes can be attributed to them. Other issued on her agenda are the progression of the Criminal Justice Act, the ideology surrounding the stereotype of youth as 'villain
ised' and not 'victimised' and the relation between politics and youth crime. The politicians of the 60s and 70s did nothing to aid this, comparing bad children to a 'spreading disease' which needs to be controlled and eradicated. Throughout the book Brown emphasises and re-emphasises the stigmatization and generalisation of youth in society by the media. The preconceptions of youth, and also the private interests of the media and politicians, must be dropped in order for the real problem to be addressed subjectively as opposed to objectively. Brown also illustrates the differences between the progression of British studies of criminology relative to American studies, outlining chronologically the key events and points referring to psychologists and criminologists alike such as Durkheim, Merton, Garland, Muncie and Davis. As a result a moral panic arises and young people as a whole suffer as 'being problems'. I believe in this 'Zero Tolerance' attitude to an extent as we know the causes of crime to be fundamentally related to economic, educational and demographic matters. Because they are isolated as 'others', distinguished from 'the rest of us law-abiding citizens', they go unvoiced in society. In this way we can see that age-stages are 'conceived and articulated in particular societies into culturally specific sets of ideas and philosophies, attitudes and practices. Unfair as these stereotypes may be, I would tend to agree with them to an extent. Brown emphasises strongly that 'society barely recognizes young people's vulnerability to crime, refuses to acknowledge the status of adults as overwhelmingly the perpetrators of crime, and refuses to loosen its attachment to the framing of 'youth' as the villain'.
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