Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness

by John Hagan , Bill McCarthy

• ISBN13: 9780521646260
• ISBN10: 052164626X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-08-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Mean Streets is a field study of young people who have left home and school and are living on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver. This book includes the personal narratives and explanatory accounts, in their own words, of some of the more than four hundred young people who participated in the summer-long study, which featured intensive personal interviews. The study examines why youth take to the streets, their struggles to survive on the street, their victimization and involvement in crime, their associations with other street youth, especially within 'street families', their contacts with the police, and their efforts to leave the street and rejoin conventional society. Major theories of youth crime are analyzed and reappraised in the context of a new social capital theory of crime.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
James F. Short Jr.
Acknowledgments	xi
List of Tables and Illustrations	xiii
Street and School Criminologies	1	(21)
Street Youth and Street Settings	22	(33)
Taking to the Streets	55	(25)
Adversity and Crime on the Street	80	(25)
The Streets of Two Cities	105	(30)
Criminal Embeddedness and Criminal Capital	135	(23)
Street Youth in Street Groups	158	(21)
Street Crime Amplification	179	(21)
Leaving the Street	200	(24)
Street Criminology Redux	224	(15)
Appendix: The Methodology of Studying Street Youth	239	(22)
Notes	261	(22)
References	283	(10)
Index	293