Cultural Criminology and the Youth Problem

A growth in popular culture, the emergence of new life styles and the increasing importance of media representations in the last two decades have opened up new angles for dealing with the youth delinquencies. Cultural criminology as the melting point of criminology and cultural studies, far from seeking external causalities or making an excessive emphasis on structural and personal variables, assumes both crimes and criminals as social constructs whose understanding requires attending to the social context and the power relations existing in the society. The present paper first makes a quick review of discursive developments on the issue of youthscrimes. Following that I will make an account of cultural criminology approach and the capacities it shows explaining some current youth (sub) cultural issues. It is argued that cultural criminology is a useful option for revising the boundaries between culture and crime and could lead to a better understanding of the youth problems and therefore results in a better policy making.