Youth and the Canadian Criminal Justice System

• NCJ Number: 184162
• Author(s): Shahid Alvi
• Date Published: 2000
• Length: 202 pages
• Sale Source: Anderson Publishing Co
• Publication Format: Book (Softbound)
• Publication Type: Overview Text
• Language: English
• Country: Canada

Annotation

This overview of Canadian youth involvement in the criminal justice system discusses youth crime in context, the magnitude and nature of youth crime, why youth commit crimes, youth in the criminal justice system, and from youth justice to social justice.

Abstract

The first chapter provides a context for understanding youth in conflict with the law. It begins by showing that the social position of youth in Canada has changed over the past 100 years. In particular, many youth are the victims of significant and deepening social and economic inequalities. The first chapter also examined how youth and youth offenses are defined, the media's construction of images of youth in conflict with the law, and the legal context for societal responses to youth crime in Canada. The second chapter examines some important aspects of what is known about the quality and quantity of youth crime in Canada. It also addresses some of the advantages and disadvantages of particular methods of collecting data on crime, as well as the importance of understanding how to interpret statistics. The data presented show that, contrary to most media accounts, youth are not getting more violent. Other topics considered are race, class, and gender, and the chapter explores what is known about the ways these factors intersect and interact with one another. In considering why youth commit crimes, the third chapter examines criminological theories that focus on youth crime as a property of individuals and youth crime as a property of the environment. Chapter Four provides an overview of youth involvement in the criminal justice system, with attention to stages and outcomes, as well as justice models. The concluding chapter focuses on solutions to youth crime from the perspective of "critical criminology," which emphasizes that much of the youth crime problem stems from public and political misunderstanding of the realities of crime, at the very least, and quite likely from deliberate manipulation of "the facts" for political or other gain. Each chapter is accompanied by discussion questions, problem solving scenarios, and suggested readings. 286 references and a subject index