Description: This field study features intensive personal interviews of more than four hundred young people who have left home and school and are living on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver. The study examines why youth take to the streets, their struggles to survive there, 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 rejoin conventional society. Major theories of youth crime are analyzed and reappraised in the context of a new social capital theory of crime.
Review Quotes: "Hagan and McCarthy show in an evocative new way why social programs to combat homelessness, hunger, and child abuse; active labour market programs; and resorative justice, rather than stigmatizing punishment, are the policy prescription that should occupy our attention. Homeless youth are found not to be alone and untouchable, but touched in destructive ways that might be repaired. Through making the shift from school criminology to street criminology, Hagan and McCarthy suggest how the field might shake off its current nihilism. Mean Streets reframes criminology's great debates with data of a most illuminating sort." John Braithwaite, The Australian National University