Divided into three parts, this book, utilizing leading national and international academic scholars, assesses the relation between evidence and policy as a means of understanding youth crime and justice. Part 1 situates youth crime and youth justice within historical and social-structural contexts. The chapters in part 1 reestablish the importance of historical memory for understanding the present and the primary significance of structural relations and social divisions for conceptualizing: (1) the adverse socio-economic and cultural contexts within which identifiable groups of children and young people are grouped in advanced industrial societies; (2) the complex material conditions within which youth crime is located; and (3) the means by which disadvantaged young people are regulated, controlled, and even criminalized by youth justice agencies. Part 2 engages explicitly with the symbolic domination of evidenced-based policy within dominant youth justice discourse, and it subjects both the evidence and its relation to policy and critical assessment. Part 3 attempts to integrate many of the themes that run through the book. It is argued that youth justice itself is a contested and multi-faceted construct, and that youth justice systems comprise settlements of multiple thematic importance. Index