Juvenile crime: the rise and crisis of criminological theory

The mainline in the development of sociological juvenile criminology is that of successive achievement of negative results. Social class, race, gender, gang-membership, culture, failed social control, low self-control, and socially disorganized neighborhood - all have been advanced and rejected as factors of criminalization and victimization of adolescents. This paper attempts to provide a brief historical overview of sociological research on juvenile delinquency with the view to identify tendencies of the theoretical development in the field. I argue that the crisis of juvenile criminology is part of the general crisis in the field of criminological research, which manifests itself in dissolution and trivialization of the sociological explanation of crime. I expound the failure of criminology to explain the peak of criminal activity between the age of 15 and 25 by suggesting an asymmetrical causation hypothesis: the reasons for engaging in criminal activities are different from those for withdrawing from. I argue that criminology and biocriminology share the same error of taking sampling traits for causes - with the result that the question of «Who commits crimes?» is answered instead of «Why do people commit crimes?» As criminology faces the general problem of the nature of social order, biocriminology eschews it by reducing social organization to things biological. I suggest that as criminology fails to assess the role of agents of social and state control, it tends to see crime as breach of social order and fails to see crime as actually being a means to sustain it.