Medical texts provide a powerful means of accessing contemporary perceptions of illness and through them assumptions about the nature of the body and identity. By mapping these perceptions, from their nineteenth-century focus on illness located in a biological body through to their 'discovery' of the psycho-social patient of the late twentieth century, a history of identity, both physical and psychological, is revealed.

This book explores young people's 'nested' and 'political' ecological relationships with crime through an empirical investigation of the important 'places' and 'spaces' in young people's lives; in their social relationships with peers and family members; and within formal institutional systems such as education, youth justice and social care.