ABSTRACT
One of the enduring myths of political and social life is the one that sees young people as being the central cause of forms of crime and disorder that strike at the very heart of the stability and prosperity of contemporary social life. It is a convenient myth that both constructs and brings into social being the image of ‘criminal youth’ (Muncie 1999) to be feared, distrusted, puzzled over and forever surveyed. Almost every week we agonise over the downward moral spiral of our young as they are seen by the media to plunge ever further into the depths of violence and incomprehensible and dangerous black humour. Each death in a school in America, such as the ‘Trench coat’ gang massacre in Denver, sparks a new debate about youth in Britain. For politicians and public alike there lies in this ‘simple’ construction a correspondingly ‘simple’ and thereby recognisable ‘truth’ that we all appear enthusiastically and willingly to grasp. It is a simplistic premise that places young people as the major cause of the ‘cracks’ in capitalism. This leads to the belief that there are and must be correspondingly simple political and social remedies that can be aimed at controlling young people in order to ‘care’ for capitalism. Along with this enduring myth
is the corresponding enduring practical process of the criminalisation of young people which maintains the never-ending reconstruction of young people as ‘the devils of the street’.
