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Jigsaw: A Political Criminology of Youth Homelessness

NCJ Number
162839
Author(s)
P Carlen
Date Published
1996
Length
164 pages
Annotation
The causes and consequences of youth homelessness in Great Britain are analyzed, using information from interviews with 150 youths.
Abstract
The analysis focuses on the historical, economic, and political conditions that have shaped homelessness today and examines the implications for the politics of youth citizenship. The author argues that a significant number of homeless young adults have had their worlds so severely disrupted by the effects of housing scarcity, unemployment, and cuts in welfare, that attempts to survive and repair their shattered lives necessarily involve a reordering or political, moral, and economic possibilities. The analysis emphasizes how today's youth homelessness is a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon, which is caught in the tensions between late-modern systems of welfare and regulation, postmodern creativities of identity risk and reflexivity, and premodern fears about the wanderer, the traveler, and the mendicant. Index, list of participants, and approximately 200 references