Welsh Journals

Book Reviews Geographical Perspectives on Juvenile Delinquency. D.J.Evans. Gower and Retailing and Planning Associates. Farnborough (1980) pp. 132. ISBN 0 566 00351 1. Price (hardback) £ 9.50. The tendency for the results of much academic research to receive limited circulation, in summary form, via the pages of specialist academic journals or to gather dust in university libraries has long been recognised. Attempts to overcome this, in the form of in-house working papers and research series, nave been of only marginal success, frequently offering a circulation inferior to that of the more reputable journals. In the monograph series published by Gower, academics have an opportunity to utilise the marketing of an inter- national publisher to present the results of their research. In Geo- graphical Perspectives on Juvenile Delinquency, we see the outcome of this, David Evans having taken the opportunity to present the re- sults of his Doctoral research at the University College, Swansea. Sponsored by the Home Office, the research is a case study of juven- ile delinquency using offender data for the City of Cardiff. In chapter 1, Evans demonstrates how principal components analysis and clust- er analysis can be employed to identify delinquency areas i.e. areas in which the delinquent tradition is "so strong that it involves such minority groups of offenders as the younger young offenders and female offenders" and "high rates of offenders committing the more serious crimes". Having examined the spatial distribution of delin- quency, he then proceeds to an ecological analysis, relating the 1966 and 1967 offender rates to environmental indices. This reveals, per- haps not surprisingly, that the incidence of delinquency is associated with low socio-economic status "and in particular with manual occupations, with local authority rented accommodation, poor hous- ing conditions, broken homes, high rates of intra-urban residential mobility, large families and low levels of economic activity". While suggesting, therefore, that delinquency can be related to the cycle of poverty, Evans recognises that the utility of such ecological analyses is descriptive rather than explanatory. Accordingly, the study con- cludes with the analysis of a questionnaire survey of 497 randomly- selected households in 6 sample areas possessing different delin- quency rates but representing a "cross-section of the areas in British cities which are characterised by high delinquency rates". From the results of this survey, Evans concludes that although area differences exist, juvenile delinquency is not the result of community instability or social disorganisation, but the product of a social tradition or or- ganisation which condones and encourages delinquent behaviour. While such a conclusion will not be well-received in all quarters, the book is a succinct statement of a well-organised, honest piece of research into one of the many problems facing contemporary society. Rather sadly, the offender statistics are somewhat dated and no date is given for the questionnaire survey. Even so, the book provides a valuable example of the contribution which the modern academic