Richard Rosenfeld, Mark Edberg, Xiangming Fang and Curtis S. Florence (Eds.): Economics and Youth Violence: Crime, Disadvantage, and Community

Excerpt

In Economics and youth violence: Crime, disadvantage, and community editors Rosenfeld, Edberg, Fang, and Florence unpack the widely accepted notion that you are a product of your environment. Narrowing their research focus to the issue of youth development, the authors explore the connections linking macroeconomic conditions to youth engagement in violent behavior. This line of research has been a longstanding point of interest for policymakers. However, the authors quickly present the gaps in existing literature, which they describe as scarcely revealing the actual impact societal influences like macroeconomics have on youth violence. These identified voids ground their project. The authors collect contributions from a considerable number of studies and organize the project into four parts: one, trends in macroeconomic conditions and youth violence; two, the neighborhood context; three, child development, families, and youth violence; and four, looking into the future, which thoughtfully proposes new starting points for future research. Most strikingly, each chapter either explicitly or implicitly introduces policy implications of the data discussed, which only strengthens the book’s functional utility in areas of academia and legislative reform. …