By Mabel Ruth Fernald, Mary Holmes Stevens Hayes, and Almena Dawley.

“The system of penal institutions of any state and the planned of administration of each given institution are determined in part at least by certain conceptions regarding the persons who are handled. These conceptions may be vague and unformulated they may be definite and dogmatically propounded. In either case they form one important element of the determination procedure and become of practical importance The acceptance this point view has become almost universal among those who interest themselves in modern penology from either theoretical or more practical aspects.”

NY Century (1920) 556 pages.

By William Healy.

Text-book of Diagnosis and Prognosis for all Concerned in Understanding Offenders. “While other books on crime and criminals have been written, the intensive study of the individual offender in the intimacy and detail which are shown in this book, is unique and revealing.”

Boston. Little Brown (1918) 848 pages.

By A. Dirks.

This dissertation project focuses on forced re-education policies for juvenile delinquents in the Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia) and uses this topic to show the interaction between a 'modernizing' Dutch colonial state and the growth of a colonial civil society, between approximately 1872 and 1942. It uncovers specific government and private initiatives – like state re-education institutes, orphanages, and schools – that attempted to turn young delinquents of Indonesian and (Indo-)European heritage into 'proper' Dutch colonial subjects and citizens. The dissertation shows that a colonial civil society - both European and indigenous - was rapidly developing in the twentieth century and had an undeniable influence on state policies. The book also seeks to understand and reveal the influence of racialized government and private reform policies on the lives of the children that were deemed 'delinquent', their parents and communities.This dissertation focuses on forced re-education policies for juvenile delinquents in the Netherlands Indies (now Indonesia) and uses this topic to show the interaction between a 'modernizing' Dutch colonial state and the growth of a 'colonial civil society', between approximately 1872 and 1945. It explains the development of specific government and private initiatives like state re-education institutes, orphanages, and schools that attempted to turn young delinquents of Indonesian and (Indo-)European heritage into 'proper' Dutch colonial subjects and citizens. The dissertation shows that a colonial civil society was rapidly developing in the twentieth century and had an undeniable influence on state policies. The dissertation reveals the impact of racialized government and private reform policies on the lives of the children that were deemed 'delinquent', their parents and communities.

Leiden: Leiden University, 2011. 384p.

By Janique Kroese.

The aim of this dissertation is to assess the effect of growing up in a single-parent family during childhood and adolescence on adolescents’ involvement in delinquency. More specifically, it investigates whether different types of single-parent families have different effects, and whether these effects depend on parental involvement in crime.

Amsterdam: Free University of Amsterdam, 2022. 204p.

By Paul Drucker and Maurice Beck Hexter.

“The presentation of social case-histories involves problems different from those of legal cases, a difference in which inhere both a strength and a weakness. In legal cases there is an ultimate decision before a supreme judicial body. In social work authoritative procedure and technique have still to be worked out, and, what is more important, there never issues a final decision as to who is right and who is wrong.”

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923. 421p.

By Cyril Burt.

“There is an old tripartite division of the mind, which dis-tinguishes, as relatively independent aspects of our common conscious life, intelligence, emotion, and character. It views a human being as one who knows, and feels, and wills. In considering, therefore, children whose minds are subnormal, it becomes convenient to recognize three classes or types: first, those who are subnormal intellectually; secondly, those who are subnormal emotionally; and, thirdly, those who are subnormal in morality and character—or, in single words, the backward, the unstable, and the delinquent.”

New York: D. Appleton, 1930.619p.

By William Healy and August F. Bronner.

Their making and unmaking : studies in two American cities. “Convinced that the first step toward improvement in the treatment of delinquency is measurement of the effectiveness of methods of treatment, we began several years ago a special research concerning outcomes. Our case studies of a large series of juvenile offenders, the first extensive group studied by scientific methods, we have reviewed in the light of what was done with and for the individual. The work has grown and we have entered into other inquiries concerning the results of treatment in other series and in another city, all for the sake of what might be learned by comparative studies. Such evaluations offer the only possible basis for the shaping of wiser policies for the prevention and treatmentof delinquency and crime.”

New York: Macmillan, 1926. 317p.

By Martin Kalb.

Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973. In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical threat that young men and women posed to postwar stability. As Martin Kalb shows in this fascinating study, constructs like the rowdy young boy and the sexually deviant girl served as proxies for the diffuse fears of adult society, while allowing authorities ranging from local institutions to the U.S. military government to strengthen forms of social control.

New York; Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2016. 285p.

By Efi Avdela.

The United Nations, the Council of Europe and the Place of Greece. This book examines how the intensive discussions about the issue of juvenile delinquency in the new international organizations (United Nations, World Health Organization, Council of Europe), which emerged after the end of the Second World War, internationalized the anxieties generated in the fifties and sixties by its purported increase in Europe and beyond. Greece, a regular member-state, anxious to ensure international legitimacy in the aftermath of the Civil War, presented abroad an embellished picture of the measures undertaken at home for the prevention and containment of juvenile delinquency, sidestepping the strong moralism and the juridical formalism that dominated both official and unofficial approaches.

Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2018. 55p.

By T.M. van der Pol.

Adolescents with delinquency and cannabis abuse, primarily boys, are predisposed to a variety of comorbid psychiatric psychopathology and form an intricate subgroup which is difficult to treat (Merikangas et al., 2010; Zahn-Waxler, Shirtcliff, & Marceau, 2008). Systemic treatments are considered the type of treatment which renders the most promising results in addressing the complex taxonomy of adolescents’ problem behaviours (Carr, 2009; Von Sydow, Retzlaff, Beher, Haun, & Schweitzer,2013; Waldron & Turner, 2008). Clinicians working with this group of adolescents have to deal, on a daily basis, with serious issues and have to make difficult decisions, impacting the adolescent, his/her family, and society as a whole. For the forensic research field, comprehending and grasping the complexity of these adolescents, which could generate insights and practical advises leading to improvement of care, is a tough and demanding task. This dissertation tries to inform clinical and research practice by providing insight and knowledge concerning: the common elements of systemic treatment, the effectiveness of Multidimensional Family Therapy (MDFT), and the predictive value on treatment outcome of baseline characteristics of the adolescent. This to better understand systemic treatments and to be better able to match a treatment with the individual adolescent’s psycho-social make-up.

Leiden: Leiden University, 2019. 183p.

By Claudia Wallner.

This paper examines the key limitations of youth empowerment interventions in preventing and countering violent extremism, and identifies potential solutions to overcome these. Age is frequently identified as a risk factor or a predictor for engagement in violent extremism. Indeed, certain factors associated with youth – such as changes in social identity, weakened social control and the intensified influence of peer groups – can make individuals more susceptible to violent extremist influences. Yet, using age as a predictor for engagement in such behaviour does not account for the vast majority of young people who do not engage in violent extremism. It also does little for identifying the minority who do engage in it. Youth programmes are often based on a simplistic understanding of the reasons why some young people engage in violent extremism. Consequently, they struggle with targeting their activities and fail to address the complex factors that drive young people to violent extremism. The programmatic focus on youth as a potential extremist threat and the lack of clear criteria to decide which young people to focus the attention of P/CVE work on can lead to the securitisation of everyday, youth-related activities and the framing of youth as a ‘suspect community’.

Key findings and recommendations. Narrow, age-based definitions of youth are not applicable in areas where achieving adulthood does not depend on reaching a certain age. In order to be relevant to the contexts in which they are implemented, interventions should work with regional and national definitions of youth that typically take locally relevant factors into account. Better targeting strategies that are based on evidence about risk and resilience factors and their cumulative impacts are needed to allocate resources efficiently and avoid the marginalisation of already vulnerable groups. This underscores the need for a better understanding of youth motivations and a move away from viewing the entire ‘youth’ segment of the population as a potential terror threat. Youth agendas tend to adopt a highly securitised view of young people, particularly young males, that perceives them as a threat to peace and stability. An improved and context-specific understanding of gender with regard to youth could help tailor interventions to the intended target audiences.

London: Royal United Services Institute, 2021. 73p.