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The community or neighborhood in which juvenile lives constitute an important context and it influences juvenile delinquency. This article describes the role of communities in the production of delinquency. It begins by identifying community characteristics of importance and describes why researchers have most frequently been examining these. Following this, it discusses the various theoretical mechanisms proposed to account for the link between community characteristics and rates of delinquency. It then presents two critical weaknesses in the communities and delinquency literature, and explains how they have been addressed to some degree in contextual studies of delinquency. Furthermore, it reviews the main findings from the contextual effects literature. Finally, the article concludes by identifying more general issues that warrant attention in communities and delinquency studies and by charting some promising new directions for research.

Youth violence is a public health problem that compromises the healthy development of youth and communities. This article makes an attempt to develop a theoretical model of the situational and transactional features of urban youth violence. It describes the heuristic presentation of the compositional aspects of youth violence events focusing on the most central situational characteristics. Following this, it describes how those characteristics converge in the early stages of a conflict interaction. It emphasizes on opening interactions, interpretations of social cues, relational distance between actors, and respondents' perceptions of the hostile intent of others. Furthermore, it specifies an emergent transactional model by focusing on the sequential stages of the event and the roles that actors play as the event moves through time. It concludes by situating the emergent transactional theory for urban youth violence within the broader violence literature and make suggestions for its relevance to juvenile justice policy.

This article examines the nature of delinquent and related problem behavior in schools. It suggests that public perceptions that the quality of many urban schools is low has the effect of exacerbating the concentration of populations of young people at elevated risk of both delinquent behavior and poor educational outcomes in some communities. It describes delinquency and related problem behaviors in schools and suggests that delinquents and dropouts are engaged in a variety of problem behaviors, and they are low achieving, poorly motivated, and uncommitted to school. It also discusses whether individual characteristics predispose young people to problem behavior and poor school achievement. Furthermore, the chapter reveals the implications of school demography for delinquency and educational outcomes. Finally, it presents an argument concerning whether or not schools should be concerned with preventing delinquency.