Definition
Youth crime is offending by people below the age of adult criminal responsibility — typically defined in legal terms (under 18 in most jurisdictions) and in developmental terms (the adolescent peak in self-reported and recorded offending). The category covers everything from minor property theft and public-order offences to serious interpersonal violence.
The age-crime curve, one of the most reliable findings in criminology, shows offending rising sharply through early adolescence, peaking in the mid-to-late teens, and falling rapidly through the twenties. This pattern holds across countries, cohorts, and self-report versus official measures, and it has shaped almost every theory of crime since Quetelet's nineteenth-century statistics.
Why it matters
How it works
The empirical literature distinguishes between adolescence-limited offending (transient, normal, almost universal) and life-course-persistent offending (rare, early-onset, often linked to neurodevelopmental or family adversity), a typology developed by Terrie Moffitt. Most policy work concerns the first group, where the question is how to avoid criminalising young people in ways that turn a phase into a career.
Successive waves of policy have oscillated between welfare and justice models: rehabilitative youth-court systems, then "tough on crime" turns toward punishment, then diversion and restorative approaches. Evidence consistently favours diversion, family-based intervention, and minimising contact with the formal system. Yet political incentives reward visible toughness, and reforms are easily reversed by a high-profile case. Critical scholars also note how race, class, and gender shape which young people get treated as victims of circumstance and which as folk devils.