List of Contributors List of Entries Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the Third Edition Editors' Introduction The Sage Dictionary of Criminology Subject Index Name Index Subject Index

Since the early twentieth century, most young offender legislation worldwide has been formulated on the basis that children and young people who find themselves in conflict with the law should be dealt with separately from adults and protected from the full weight of the criminal law. These young offender laws are based on an assumption that young people under a certain age are doli incapax (deemed incapable of forming the intent to commit a crime) and, accordingly, cannot be held fully responsible for their actions. A commitment to act in a 'child's best interests' and to protect and promote children's human rights are foundational principles for all systems of juvenile justice. A key driver of this phenomenon is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989 and subsequently ratified by 193 countries. Similarly, representative are the authoritative rights-informed guidelines on 'child-friendly justice' that have been ratified by the Council of Europe. A key question, however, is whether and to what extent individual nation-states actually comply with their 'child-friendly justice' obligations. Indeed, there remains a clear disjuncture between the promise of international rights discourse on the one hand and the limitations of territorial jurisdictional implementation on the other.

This article focuses on the anomalies and contradictions surrounding the notion of 'international juvenile justice', whether in its pessimistic (neoliberal penality and penal severity) or optimistic (universal children's rights and rights compliance) incarnations. It argues for an analysis which recognises firstly, the uneven, multi-facetted and heterogeneous nature of the processes of globalisation; and secondly, how the global, the international, the national and the local are not mutually exclusive but continually interact to re-constitute, remake and challenge each other.

The impact of globalisation on juvenile justice is increasingly conceptualised with reference to neo-liberal governance and the intensification of ‘new punitiveness’. Whatever the merits of such analyses, they have the effect of marginalising, if not completely overlooking, the extent to which international human rights instruments might serve to neutralise and/or mediate punitive currents. Indeed, it might be argued that the commitment – repeatedly expressed in official discourse – to both protect and promote the human rights of children in conflict with the law has itself come to comprise a discursive and tangible dimension of global child governance. Key signifiers of this phenomenon – at the global level – include a corpus of interrelated human rights conventions, standards, treaties and rules, formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, whilst at the European level authoritative rights-informed guidelines on ‘child friendly justice’, ratified by the Council of Europe, are similarly representative. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to investigate the degree to which individual nation states receive and respond to their human rights and ‘child friendly justice’ obligations. Whilst recognising the mediating capacities of formal human rights instruments, we aim to critically interrogate the relations between globalised rhetoric and localised reality; between the promise of international rights discourse on the one hand and the limitations of territorial jurisdictional implementation on the other.

Surprisingly, there has been little or no systematic research to date that has explored the significance of UK devolution for youth justice policy and practice. This article explores the extent of differential justice in the United Kingdom, particularly as it is expressed in the myriad action plans, criminal justice reviews, frameworks for action, delivery plans and offending strategies that have surfaced since 1998. In particular, the article considers how far policy convergence and divergence are reflected through the discourses of risk, welfare, restoration and children's rights in the four administrations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For comparative criminology, the United Kingdom offers a unique opportunity to explore how international and national pressures towards convergence and/or divergence can be challenged, rebranded, versioned, adapted or resisted at sub-national and local levels.

[About the book] In a three volume collection Wolf Legal Publishers presents The Transnational Criminology Manual. ... [T]his Encyclopedia provides an elaborate insight in criminology and its specifics. The Transnational criminology manual provides comprehensive coverage of the leading topics in criminology. Whereas the first volume provides the readers with an introduction to criminology, the second and third volume include timely topics such as internet crimes, money laundering, victimization and therapy.

Explores the varied means of intervention and correction that currently make up the juvenile justice landscape in jurisdictions worldwide.

The Daily Telegraph (18 April 2008) recently ran with the headline ‘Teenage drinkers could be criminalised’. In 2007 the Chair of the Youth Justice Board resigned primarily in frustration that ‘we ...