Introduction

Research on ‘youth’ and juvenile offending burgeoned in the postwar decades with the emergence of teenage youth cultures which were regarded as new and entirely separate from the parent generation (Hoggart 1957, Nuttall 1968, Fyvel 1963, Cashmore 1984). Consequently little attention was paid to the possible continuity in experience, the transition from youth to adulthood, or the experiences and processes of change in the period from adolescence to adulthood and beyond. We know next to nothing about the attitudes of adults who offended in their youth, and whether these attitudes differ from, or reinforce, earlier experience.