Tiltai

The article discusses the declining juvenile crime rate in Klaipėda between 1995 and 2019. The city of Klaipėda was chosen as an empirical illustration allowing not only to focus on a social phenomenon but also to identify possible directions of wider interpretation and causal links. The authors have already presented a sociological reconstruction of the identities of Klaipėda between 1990 and 2010,* and therefore the dynamics of juvenile crime discussed in the light of new statistical, sociological and especially legal perspectives should be approached as a continuation of the analysis of juvenile crime in Klaipėda. Placing juvenile crime in the context of social problems, the authors see legal changes and programmes in juvenile justice as possible reasons for the declining juvenile crime rate. However, with the conclusions and discussion in the article being based on four hypothetical assumptions for the declining crime rate (delinquency is caused by the process of juvenile biological and social development; a completely opposite hypothesis: with the end of maturation, delinquent behaviour also ceases; links between delinquency and socially vulnerable families; a return to K. Mannheim’s idea of a contract between the elite of society and youth) provoke a continuation of research in the field of youth crime.