The New Politics of Youth Crime argues that the centrality of 'law and order' to the New Labour project has generated a youth justice strategy which threatens to deepen the problems it purports to solve. Analysing the profound changes in UK youth crime in the 1980s, this book posits the French Social Prevention Initiative of the 1980s as an alternative model for a genuinely 'joined-up', social democratic response to the increasingly complex problem of youth crime in Europe.