Delinquency and modernity in cyberspace?: Comments on America’s Safest City

America’s Safest City is a must read for anyone concerned with issues of delinquency, juvenile justice, and suburban youth. In the book, Singer presents his theory of delinquency and modernity, offering a truly fresh perspective on the sources of delinquency in contemporary American society. There are so many things to like about this book: it introduces a new theoretical perspective; it directs a scholarly lens at the suburb, a place of American life that has been vastly neglected by criminologists; and, it draws on rich data from varied sources including ethnographic work, interviews with troubled youth, parents, and service providers, and extensive surveys of teenage residents in Amherst, New York—considered one of the safest places to live in America. America’s Safest City is also exceedingly well-written. It is one of those rare academic books which are hard to put down before reaching the end. It is also the case that the publication of America’s Safest City could not have come at a better time. At a timewhen there appears to be both a general tension and de facto separation between macro-criminology, concerned with large-scale historical, social, cultural, and demographic factors, and micro-criminology, concerned with individuals, small groups, and small-scale spaces, it is refreshing to see both persons and environment simultaneously considered in criminological theorizing. Singer’s theory of delinquency and modernity unites places with people, accounting for individuals as well as how they respond to broader societal and structural conditions. In this sense, it is truly an interactional theory along the lines of arguments made by James F. Short in his 1997 American Society of Criminology Presidential Address, The Level of Explanation Problem Revisited [1]. Singer’s theory of delinquency and modernity integrates both societal and relational components. First, there is the structure of society itself, which constitutes the modernity aspect of Singer’s thesis. It assumes that modern-day societies are complex and Crime Law Soc Change DOI 10.1007/s10611-017-9686-2