The article focuses on the criminalization of young people’s alternative cultural spaces as a strategy of social and cultural control, as a defense of mainstream cultural space and its boundaries. In contemporary conflicts over youth and cultural space, cultural and criminal dynamics are regularly confused, most often in the interests of those in power. This criminalization and confusion does not incorporate a one-way exercise of authority; it regularly emerges in response to prior cultural resistance and elicits new forms of resistance in return. The creation of alternative cultural space and the battle over criminalization ground the practice of politics and resistance squarely in the moments of young people’s everyday lives -- lives played out on the streets, in the neighborhoods, and over the airwaves. Notes, references