Taking a 'Political Ecological' Approach to Examining Youth Offenders

Taking a ‘political ecological’ approach to examining young people’s relationship with crime will help us better understand why they offend?

– “[t]hey are ‘ordinary’ kids just ‘doing life’ to the best of their abilities in circumstances, not necessarily of their making” (France, et al., p.177).

INTRODUCTION
The discussion about youth or young people is always fascinating, not only for the parents with teenage or for junior and senior high school’s teacher, but also for scholars who wants to explore deeper the puzzling world of the youths. Through sociological analysis, in many parts of the world, young people are regarded as the agent of change. Nevertheless, they are also associated as juvenile offenders in various degree of mischief.

Following Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset (1923), Mannheim (1952[1928]: 296) explained that because of the lack of experience (which ‘facilitates their living in a changing world’) background that young people have, they might play a significant role in social change (See Berger, 1960, Merico, 2009). Additionally, as ‘outsiders’, young people is enable to accommodate new attitudes, behaviours and cultural patterns. Arulmani et al (2014) stated that youth have the capabilities “to expand their notions of who they are, who they can be, and who would they like to be, and set forth on the challenging task of navigating adulthood and (more specifically) their careers”; even so, not all of young people have the same opportunities to leverage these capabilities.

Independent Commission on Youth Crime and Antisocial Behaviour (ICYCAB) (2010) reported that most young people in UK have a petty or minor criminal record, at least once in their lifetime. Most of them have also ‘grown out’ of crime before they are 18. Although sometimes the number of offenders is decreasing in some periods and increasing in others, youth crime is becoming a persistent problem (ICYCAB, 2010; France, 2012). New Zealand history also showed how

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