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Mean Streets

Mean Streets

Mean Streets

Youth Crime and Homelessness
John Hagan, University of Toronto
Bill McCarthy, University of Victoria, British Columbia
December 1998
Paperback
9780521646260

    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.

    • Provides detailed attention to new problems of urban street youth
    • Extensive use of detailed narrative field interviews
    • Theoretical innovation in the study of youth crime

    Awards

    Winner of the Sunderland Prize of the American Society for Criminology for a lifetime body of work

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    Product details

    December 1998
    Paperback
    9780521646260
    320 pages
    229 × 152 × 18 mm
    0.47kg
    6 b/w illus. 2 maps 39 tables
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Street and school criminologies
    • 2. Street youth in street settings
    • 3. Taking to the streets
    • 4. Adversity and crime on the streets
    • 5. The streets of two cities
    • 6. Criminal embeddedness and criminal capital
    • 7. Street youth in street groups
    • 8. Street crime amplification
    • 9. Leaving the street
    • 10. Street crime redux.
      Authors
    • John Hagan , University of Toronto
    • Bill McCarthy , University of Victoria, British Columbia