At-risk girls and delinquency: Career paths

Through fieldwork and interviews examining the careers of girls in the juvenile justice system, this study re-assesses the current state of girls in the system thirty years after the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act decriminalizing status offenses. This study will examine the circumstances/context of the girls' offenses to shed light on the factors underlying the construction of these offenses. The data reveal the role of family conflict in the girls' careers and how issues of parental authority are negotiated between the girls and their parent(s). The findings suggest the ways that parental responses to challenges of authority may facilitate the girls' contact with, entry into, and movement through the justice system. This study explores the possibility that challenges to parental authority that would otherwise be considered status offenses are now being processed as crimes or delinquencies.;Given that incarceration is an element of how these girls move through the system, this study will also analyze the girls' institutional careers. It will examine the processes of institutionalization and the various behavioral patterns that emerged in response to these institutionalization processes. The findings reveal that institutional therapeutic/rehabilitative efforts are largely subsumed by peacekeeping efforts as the energies of both clinical and non-clinical staff are consumed with mediating contentious relations between the girls. The focus of the girls becomes navigating the difficult peer culture and peer surveillance. Unlike previous studies of male inmates, there was no 'inmate code' in operation, as the girls' allegiances were more with the staff than with each other.;This study also examines the context/circumstances of girls' lives after they are released and reveals what has changed and what has remained the same. The findings illustrate the continuing significance of family conflicts over parental authority after the girls are released. The data suggest that those instances in which the girls fare best during post-release are those in which family conflicts over authority have been modified in some form. These modifications in family conflicts occur when either the parent or the daughter or both make compromises with respect to parental authority.