Book Review: Ambaras, D. R. (2006). Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 297
| Author | Mokerrom Hossain |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1057567707310571 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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specifics of Holger Mey’s work, it seems clear that studies of this kind could be enormously useful
to planning the criminal justice of the future.
If criminal justice is to be successful in dealing with the threats of tomorrow, it needs to do much
more to describe the specific character and assess the extent of the potential harms on the horizon.
Some future criminal justice threats are, as the book argues, related to national security. Others, however,
are of a more conventional nature. Who should be responsible for prioritizing these quite different
threats? And what priority should each receive? Do current organizational structures and concepts
provide the optimum framework for dealing with both kinds of threat? How can a criminal justice
structure that has long had difficulty meshing itself with social services and other agencies involved in
coping with ordinary crime be successful in taking on new and important relationships in the national
security sphere? Measured by the kind of analysis that the book indicates is possible, neither criminal
justice bureaucracies nor criminal justice academic circles appear to be thinking sufficiently about
the challenges of the future or the changes necessary for success in the world ahead.
Floyd Feeney
University of California, Davis
Ambaras, D. R. (2006). Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life
in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 297.
DOI: 10.1177/1057567707310571
David R. Ambaras has investigated how the youths of modern Japan were being treated by the
authority of a rising imperial power whose economic and social structures were going through a
major transformation because of massive and rapid industrial growth. However, as a historian,
Ambaras could not avoid the legacies of the past and consequently traced these changes as far back
as 1700. This book, Bad Youth, reviews the roles of different institutions that emerged because of the
growth of new...
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