Book Review Essay
| Author | Angela Dwyer |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865812458054 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review Essay |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
45(3) 438–442
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865812458054
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Book Review Essay
Barry Goldson (ed.) Youth in Crisis? ‘Gangs’, Territoriality and Violence, Routledge: London, 2011;
227 pp.: ISBN 9781843927525 (hbk), ISBN 9781843927518 (pbk)
Chris Cunneen and Rob White, Juvenile Justice: Youth and Crime in Australia (4th edition), Oxford
University Press: Melbourne, 2011; 422 pp.: ISBN 9780195574098 (pbk)
Anyone familiar with the area of youth justice will understand the importance of con-
tinuing the debate about youth crime and deviancy. Youth crime seems to be a ‘problem’
existing since time immemorial that continues to garner significant interest from media,
social, and political commentators. Commentary often assumes young people engaged in
criminal behaviours are inherently criminal/deviant and in need of heavy regulation by
police and other governmental authorities (Omaji, 2003). Unreliable statistics, pastoral/
authoritarian generalisations about the ‘nature’ of young people, and moralistic sensa-
tionalism drive a law and order ethic to target young people with retributive ‘crack-
downs’ to correct their wayward conduct (Carrington and Pereira, 2009). Young people
who congregate in groups are especially demonised as ‘gangs’. In the rush to expunge
youth ‘gangs’ from public spaces, recent preventative policies have expanded the net
from criminal behaviours to a range of activities which have been cast more broadly as
antisocial behaviours (Muncie, 2009; Squires and Stephen, 2005). Activities we would
have in the past classified as leisure pursuits have been re-visioned as criminal in this new
regime focused on the eradication of young people in various group formations. All this
demonstrates the need for more work that critically reflects on these processes, and this
makes the two books under review very important. They unsettle assumptions and
misconceptions about young people, crime, and crisis, even though they do this in
very different ways.
At first glance, these books appear very different in both structure and content, yet
they both elaborate the importance of maintaining a critical, open dialogue about young
people and crime. Youth in Crisis? was compiled following a University of Liverpool
conference of the Youth Criminology/Youth Justice Network of the British Society of
Criminology in 2009 and encompasses work spanning the United Kingdom, with some-
times diverse approaches to youth ‘gangs’. Cunneen and White’s leading text focuses on
the Australian juvenile justice context and proceeds as an ‘introduction to the main
concepts and issues of juvenile justice in a way that is simple and descriptive, yet critical’
(Cunneen and White, 2011: vii). Goldson brings together a diverse (and sometimes
conflicting) range of academic perspectives that work against ‘the imagined crisis of
youth’ (Goldson, 2011: 12) elaborated in media and politics, with a view to engaging
with ‘the real crisis of knowledge deficit and the misappropriation of complex social
phenomena’ (p. 12). Cunneen and White engage with a broad range of different issues
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