| Summary: | The public debate always tackles the question of the juvenile delinquency’s evolution in behavioral terms. During the last decades, youth would have changed, they would be more violent, etc. This is a morale posture and classical decadentist discourse (« it was better by the past ») that receive empirical refutations, especially in self-reported surveys (showing the stability of problems) and criminal justice statistics (showing that offenses prosecuted are more frequent but not more serious). The sociological analysis allows to redefine the problem from the acknowledgement of the double instabilily of both legal and social status of those behaviors. First, violent behaviors are more incriminated (process of criminalization). Then, they are more denounced and prosecuted by police and justice (process of judiciarization). The main social evolutions are not to be search in youth behaviors but in adults’ reactions (more helpless and more punitive) around them. Last, in France, a problem appears with the concentration of difficulties in some urban areas suffering from several social disadvantages (process of segregation), that encourage a high level of some juveniles offenses.
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