Mean Streets
Youth Crime and Homelessness

A field study, featuring intensive personal interviews, of young people living on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver.

John Hagan (Author), Bill McCarthy (Author)

9780521646260, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 August 1998

320 pages, 6 b/w illus. 2 maps 39 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

"The authors have succeeded well in reaching their elusive population of interest (i.e., homeless youth) and have carried out a first-class empirical study of the linkages between their social conditions and criminal activity. The most understanding feature of the book lies in its imaginative operationalization of concepts and sophisticated empirical testing of theories and hypotheses. It would be difficult to find a better example of demanding, quality empirical research for fellow researchers to learn from." CJS Online

Mean Streets is a field study of young people who have left home and school and are living on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver. This book includes the personal narratives and explanatory accounts, in their own words, of some of the more than four hundred young people who participated in the summer-long study, which featured intensive personal interviews. The study examines why youth take to the streets, their struggles to survive on the street, their victimization and involvement in crime, their associations with other street youth, especially within 'street families', their contacts with the police, and their efforts to leave the street and rejoin conventional society. Major theories of youth crime are analyzed and reappraised in the context of a new social capital theory of crime.

1. Street and school criminologies
2. Street youth in street settings
3. Taking to the streets
4. Adversity and crime on the streets
5. The streets of two cities
6. Criminal embeddedness and criminal capital
7. Street youth in street groups
8. Street crime amplification
9. Leaving the street
10. Street crime redux.

Subject Areas: Crime & criminology [JKV]