DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR,OFFICIAL DELINQUENCY,AND GENDER: CONSEQUENCES FOR ADULTHOOD FUNCTIONING AND WELL‐BEING*

The general aim of this article is to evaluate the consequences of both delinquent behavior and institutionalization as a juvenile delinquent on the quality of adult functioning and well‐being, with a specific focus on gender differences. Data were gathered from two related data sources: a sample of previously institutionalized offenders (n=210) and a sample of individuals living in private households (n=721). Males and females in both samples were interviewed initially in 1982 when they were adolescents and re‐interviewed in their late twenties. Results showed that having been institutionalized as an adolescent seriously compromises multiple life domains in adulthood, especially for females. The data also show that an official delinquent status and a high level of involvement in delinquency during adolescence each has independent consequences for male and female adult functioning and well‐being. Institutionalization is strongly predictive of precarious, premature, unstable, and unsatisfied conditions in multiple life domains but much less predictive of behavioral outcomes. On the other hand, a high level of delinquency involvement in adolescence is predictive of antisocial behavior in adulthood, but it tends to have no direct effects on adversity in other life domains. These results are mostly invariant across gender.     

‘The rules are all over the place’: Mass Observation,time, and law in the COVID-19 pandemic

This article analyses practices of pandemic time making that surrounded the imposition and communication of laws restricting daily life in parts of the United Kingdom in spring 2020. With colleagues, we commissioned a Mass Observation Project directive in summer 2020, asking contributors about their everyday experience of time during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse how legal temporalities emerge across 228 responses. Initially, law making seemed belated, missing the disruptive temporalities of the pandemic. Once they arrived, pandemic rules were sudden, changeable, and confusing. Mass Observation writers forged clusters of improvised practices – tactics of anticipation – to cope with these unsettling temporalities. Meanwhile, the Hansard Society, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, and legal commentators argued that ‘fast-track’ pandemic law making was error ridden, putting the public at risk of unwitting criminal liability. Attentive to ‘polyrhythmic’ temporalities operating across fields of experience and action, our study underlines the contradictory qualities of apparently resonant constructions of legal time.