ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine career developments which involve crime, what is known about the correlates and causes of crime and what might reasonably be concluded as to how young people might be diverted from careers involving crime. In the early 1990s youth crime was very much at the forefront of public attention and a number of attempts were made to link the causes of young criminality to the wider social milieu in which young people are brought up. In the summer of 1991, for instance, there were a number of highly publicized riots in Cardiff, Oxford and Newcastle, with television pictures of arson and petrol bomb attacks on the police and shops. Young men were depicted as flaunting highperformance stolen cars and doing handbrake turns before the eager gaze of television cameras (Campbell 1993). An epidemic of “ram raiding” was reported as taking place around Newcastle in which shops and warehouses were stripped of their goods, having first been rammed open by smashing stolen cars and vans into them. After two young men were killed in a 130-mile-an-hour car chase outside the city, the father of the younger one made, what appeared to be, a proud and defensive statement to the press indicating that his boy was no mere “joyrider” but a professional car thief going about his (albeit unlawful) business earning a living (Newcastle Journal 9 September 1991, quoted by Campbell 1993). The crash was immediately followed by riots on the streets of the Meadowell Estate in which the boys lived, with the police and fire service unable to answer emergency calls for fear of being overwhelmed by angry mobs of young people. The media also gave high profile to the “rat boy” who lived in a warren of heating and ventilation ducts on an estate in Newcastle, from which he emerged to commit hundreds of thefts and acts of burglary, together with other young and persistent burglars from as far apart as Exeter, Aylesbury and
Sutton (Independent 3 March 1993, 7 October 1993, 29 July 1994). Many of these young offenders were depicted in the media as unafraid and contemptuous of the police and courts and wilfully bent on pursuing their careers in crime.
