Delinquency: Cause or Consequence of Social Exclusion?

W e do not intend to linger for long over definitions but it is helpful tobegin with what it means to be socially included. People join clubsbecause membership delivers certain desired benefits. Some people also join particular civil societies for similar reasons. And although most of us do not make this kind of deliberate choice-birth gives us membership in one such “club” and we tend to retain this exclusive membership throughout our liveswe might expect to enjoy benefits of membership just as deliberate joiners do. Let us push the analogy a little bit further: what is on the list of benefits for full members? It includes a variety of services collectively organized and deliveredthrough the apparatus of the state, and relating to such matters as education, health, transport, and housing. Politics, legislation, case law, international treaties and conventions, all continually reinterpret, refine and, more often than not, add to the list. Certainly, the contemporary citizen of this and many other countries expects and probably derives a much wider range of benefits from membership than would have been the case even one or two centuries ago. In this chapter, however, we are concerned with just one area of benefit, albeit of a particularly basic and ancient kind: the protection of individual rights and freedoms through a system of laws and means for their enforcement.