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This essay examines the issue of youth crime. We begin by laying out the basic facts and trends relevant to youth crime over the last thirty years. We then consider both the social costs of youth crime and the personal risks and costs borne by the criminals themselves. After reviewing the various hypotheses as to the determinants of crime identified in the previous literature, we present three new sets of estimates that shed light on the issue. The first set of regressions use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to explore the correlates of crime at the individual level. The second analysis focuses on census tract-level homicide data for the city of Chicago over a thirty year period. These data provide a means of better understanding the influence of social factors and local labor market conditions on youth crime. The final data set is a state-level panel covering fifteen years. The state-level analysis is ideal for examining the impact of the criminal justice system (and to a lesser extent economic factors). We use these three sets of estimates to determine the extent to which observed fluctuations in the correlates of crime can explain the time series pattern of juvenile crime over the last three decades.