1 - Introduction

Summary

Every time she comes she always gets mad at my grandma … like she choked my grandma before she went to jail. I'm always like, I don't want to hit her and stuff, but like I have a hammer and I sit it right next to my bed. 'Cause I know if my mom comes in messed up on drugs, she gets real violent … and she always comes up and rips the phone jack out of the wall and stuff. I just have to be ready …

[Jason]

We first met Jason's mother Stacy in 1982, when she was a teenager herself, in connection with a study of incarcerated juvenile offenders. We were interested in why and how girls become involved in delinquent behaviors and had been interviewing the total population of Ohio's state institution for girls and a comparable sample of delinquent boys. Over the years, we thought often about these teens, wondering what had become of that very delinquent “class of '82” (Giordano, Cernkovich, & Pugh, 1985). In 1995, we began the lengthy process of trying to locate the original study participants, who were then an average of 29 years of age and living in various locations throughout Ohio and, in some instances, the surrounding states. We were eventually able to locate and re-interview over 85 percent of the original respondents. Those interviews revealed that many of these women and men had, like Stacy, experienced continued difficulties and problems with the law (Giordano, Cernkovich, & Rudolph, 2002).