Young People’s Relations to Crime: Pathways across Ecologies

Abstract

This article analyses young people’s accounts of their relations to crime, elucidating microecological factors emphasized in developmental criminological explanations of offending and how macroecological forces emphasized in critical criminology enter their lives. Interrelated victimization, witnessing crime, cultural and societal access routes and institutional interventions including criminalization constitute their relations to crime and are formative of life pathways that include offending. Young people’s accounts suggest the need to consider the effects of distal systems both in the construction of crime as a social problem and their constitutive effects in local ecologies and individual lives.