Young People’s Relations to Crime: Pathways across Ecologies
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225409356758 |
| Date | 01 April 2010 |
| Author | Alan France,Dorothy Bottrell,Derrick Armstrong |
| Published date | 01 April 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Youth Justice
Young People’s Relations to Crime:
10(1) 56–72
© The Author(s) 2010
Pathways across Ecologies
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DOI: 10.1177/1473225409356758
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Dorothy Bottrell
University of Sydney, Australia
Derrick Armstrong
University of Sydney, Australia
Alan France
Loughborough University, UK
Abstract
This article analyses young people’s accounts of their relations to crime, elucidating microecological factors
emphasized in developmental criminological explanations of offending and how macroecological forces
emphasized in critical criminology enter their lives. Interrelated victimization, witnessing crime, cultural and
societal access routes and institutional interventions including criminalization constitute their relations to
crime and are formative of life pathways that include offending. Young people’s accounts suggest the need
to consider the effects of distal systems both in the construction of crime as a social problem and their
constitutive effects in local ecologies and individual lives.
Keywords
crime, ecologies, offending; pathways; young people’s perspectives
Introduction
Explanations of youth crime in developmental criminology have dominated the evidence
base for youth justice, particularly crime prevention policy in England and Wales.
Developmental approaches place the individual at the centre of inquiry into pathways of
offending as relations of risk, protective and other contextual factors associated with indi-
vidual behaviour. Accounts in terms of economic and social exclusion, youth and com-
mercial culture, the role of media, policy and governance appear as a largely separate
realm of crime theory. Framing these two paradigms are ‘nested’ ecologies of human
development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), which situate the problem of youth offending in the
Corresponding author:
Dr Dorothy Bottrell, Faculty of Education and Social Work, Building A35, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
Email: dorothy.bottrell@sydney.edu.au
Bottrell et al.
57
broader context of young people’s relations to crime. Offending is thus one relation; crime
also enters the lives of young people, including young offenders, as events in their envi-
ronments, as cultural preoccupations and consumption, and through the effects of social
structures and policy.
This article analyses key themes in young people’s accounts of their relations to crime.
The first section provides a necessarily brief analysis of the contrasting conceptualiza-
tions of youth crime; our principal aim is to elucidate the meanings of microecological
factors and ways in which macroecological forces are negotiated as young people’s lived
experience. Framing pathways as life stories, we foreground biographical accounts, first
by situating young people’s experiences as witnesses and victims in relation to offending;
followed by discussion of young people’s decisions around offending. The close attention
here to individual intentions and motivations may be taken as evidence for individualized
accounts of offending that characterize the mainstream developmental approach. However,
the contexts of offending that young people articulate make it clear that their own deci-
sions are only part of the story of offending and their relations to crime. The contexts they
discuss are elaborated in subsequent sections as local and dominant cultural continuities;
relations of individual and social controls, both formal and informal; and in institutional
contexts where official decisions open up or close down conventional pathways. The final
theme of young people’s prosociality is important to understanding the significance of
criminalization. Across the discussion of young people’s themes our interest goes beyond
them to what they may mean for reflection on specific concepts such as offending choices,
antisociality, self-control and pathways into and out of crime. The final sections examine
alternative pathways evident in young people’s accounts and how they call forth a redirec-
tion of analysis across ecological accounts.
Youth, Offending and Crime
In mainstream developmental criminology adolescent offending is associated with indi-
vidual traits in interaction with factors in the immediate ecology – in families, peer groups,
school and neighbourhood (Farrington, 2007; Maguin and Loeber, 1996). Underlying
propensities to offend such as low self-control (Gottfredson and Hirshi, 1990) or anti-
social tendencies (Catalano and Hawkins, 1996; Farrington, 1996; Lahey and Waldman,
2005) are posited as primary developmental features or trajectories that other factors
distinguishing individual differences cluster around. Tracking within – and between –
individual behavioural continuities and changes over the life course, stage related charac-
teristics, situations and individual choices are analysed as the contexts of multiple
pathways (Thornberry, 2005) with varied onset, persistence and desistance patterns
(Moffitt, 1993).
Developmental approaches conceptualize social situation, control, and choice as indi-
vidual configurations. Effects of neighbourhood environment, family and other informal
controls and delinquent peer groups are principally differentiated to shed light on indi-
vidual decision-making and choices (Wikström and Loeber, 2000) or to establish specific
mechanisms that may account for divergent trajectories. Societal, cultural and political
58
Youth Justice 10(1)
dimensions of circumstances, motivation and controls are considered distal factors that
cannot be reliably established. Thus important findings such as the correlation of offend-
ing with neighbourhood characteristics or school failure and exclusion do not elaborate
how relationships and processes beyond individual dispositions, choices and immediate
settings may be formative of them.
In this context structure is concerned with neighbourhood and wider factors such as
unemployment, poverty and the availability of societal opportunities and pathways
towards positive outcomes are relegated to the margins (France and Homel, 2006). This
said writers such as Sampson and Laub (2005) have adopted developmental approaches
with a more critical eye suggesting that they do not give enough attention to ‘random
developmental noise’ or ‘turning points’ that are embedded in institutional transitions and
pathways. Elder et al. (2004) suggest that developmental approaches do not have to mar-
ginalize structure if a life-course perspective is used. This model of developmentalism
recognizes both the social processes involved in human action and the shaping influences
of broader social contexts. Issues such as the wider influences on life course outcomes as
a result of the global impact of re-structured labour markets on national and local employ-
ment opportunities or policy initiatives that aim to create transitional opportunities can be
recognized as a significant factor in shaping pathways. In a life-course approach structure
is recognized as being a significant factor in the relationships young people have with
crime (France and Homel, 2006; Sampson and Laub, 2005).
Critical criminology locates causes and contexts of youth crime within social and polit-
ical processes, centred on analysis of power relations, social order and control, the
government of crime and social, economic and institutional mechanisms that effect crim-
inalization. Inequalities based on class, race and gender are reflected in the overrepresen-
tation of young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds and excluded or deprived
communities.
Crime rates as effects of structural change and routine activities as structurally con-
strained opportunities are elements of the broader political economy of crime (Reiner,
2007). The convergence of free market economies, withdrawal of the welfare state and
punitive strategies to address social breakdown are analysed as the new political order of
advanced or neo-liberal governments (Muncie, 2005) that positions ‘risky’ young people
in ‘risky’ communities as subjects in need of surveillance, control and punishment
through formal and informal systems (Garland, 1996; Simon, 1997). The intersection of
media and political agenda has driven ‘the criminalization of popular culture’ (Ferrell,
1999: 405) through discourses of ‘total panic’ over ‘almost every aspect of the lives of
young people’ (Brown, 2005: 58). These discourses exert pressure and elicit support for
earlier and more punitive interventions. From the late-1990s these have included final
warnings with attached interventions, mandatory referral orders and parenting orders.
Detention and training orders extended custodial options and preventive provisions
applied civil orders to younger children and non-offenders through curfews, child safety
and anti-social behaviour orders (Muncie, 2004). Outcomes of these changes include
penalties for low-level disorder and proportional increases in convictions for minor
offences (Bateman, 2006). Such ‘upcriming’ (Chesney-Lind and Irwin, 2008) and
Bottrell et al.
59
net-widening constitute pathways of youth offending, implicating the political motiva-
tions of governance rather than the motivations and choices of young people. The ‘new
punitiveness’ (Goldson, 2002) renders invisible the mundane, law-abiding and pro-social
orientations of people in poor communities.
From a nested ecologies perspective, crime is contextualized not in the relations of
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