Youth Offending in Transition

Monica Barry describes Youth Offending in Transition as a ‘labour of love’ and, certainly, commitment to her subject matter and to the young people she interviews emanate from it. In Chapter 1, Barry outlines the analytical framework of the book: she is aiming to help remedy criminology's weakness in grasping the significance of youth transitions in the ‘age–crime curve’ (p. 2). Her main concern is to develop the concept of social recognition, defined as ‘the attainment of a durable and legitimate combination of capital accumulation and expenditure’ in desistance (or not) from crime during the transition into adulthood. As ‘reputations’ with friends (frequently involving offending) prove less sustainable over time, young people discard these reputations for ‘more durable reputations in adulthood’ (p. 3). ‘This book,’ she writes, ‘tells young peoples’ stories of that journey to break free from one particular social identity and to adopt another’ (p. 3). Chapter 2 critiques much work on youth offending on a number of grounds. First, she charges that it is consistently insensitive to specific ‘temporal, cultural and social changes’ that impact on offending behaviour. Second, she claims that it is largely unable to accommodate the specificities of female offending. Third, she suggests that it is inadequate to explain changes in rates, seriousness and frequency of offending. Fourth, it pays insufficient attention to the social and political construction of the life course. Fifth, she criticises the youth-offending literature for the illogical use of different theories (rather than one framework) to account for the onset, maintenance and cessation of offending (p. 16). Barry recommends adopting Bourdieu's theory of capital, and a structurational analysis following Giddens (incidentally, the latter approach has been recently elaborated by Farrall and Calverley (2006)), but also invokes Matza's notion of ‘drift’ as key. The aim in this complex alignment is to bridge the gap between structure and agency, onset and maintenance of offending, and desistance through the process of youth transitions (p. 21). In this way, Barry proposes, we may understand children and young people's ‘conscious and pragmatic search for the capital associated with social integration and status, even though the capital may come from offending in the short term’ (p. 21).

Criminology · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Seriousness · Sociology · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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