ABSTRACT
This chapter will aim to provide a critical overview of contemporary patterns of youth crime and key developments in youth justice law, policy and practice. Although ‘official’ statistics do not appear to indicate that youth crime is significantly increasing in scope and/or severity, recent policy and practice responses to ‘young offenders’ have taken a markedly punitive turn. In order to account for this apparent anomaly, it will be argued that the politics of youth crime and youth justice, derived from constructions of ‘fear ’ and ‘panic’, are once again distorting popular conceptualisations and formalised responses.
