The new politics of youth crime: Discipline or solidarity?

This text is written by one of the UK's leading commentators on the policy and practice of youth justice. The author accounts for the centrality of youth crime to the New Labour project, and analyses New Labour's youth justice strategy and its articulation in the youth justice provisions of the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) and subsequent legislation. Pitts then critically dissects the theories of crime and methods of intervention which underpin the Act, suggesting that it is their political fit with a re-moralising political agenda, rather than their explanatory power of rehabilitative bite, which account for their current popularity.