La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995) shows practices of resistance of youngsters in public space. Next to the traditional milieus of socialisation – at home, at school or in institutionalised leisure facilities – youngsters demand their ‘place’ in public space. In doing so, they partly privatise public space (‘parochial space’). In this article we argue that transgressive behaviour of youngsters should be conceptualised as both a side-effect of growing up and socialisation, and as resistance against adult domination, especially in public space. As such, hanging around is cause and effect of control and criminalisation.

In this article, an ongoing Flemish qualitative research on life histories and criminal careers of women in prison is discussed. We conducted autobiographical interviews with 40 female prisoners aged between 20 and 69 years. Considering our target group, we didn’t always succeed in conducting an autobiographical interview. In practice we often conducted a classic open in-depth interview. By means of file analysis, we reconstituted the criminal career of every interviewed woman. Thanks to the retrospective approach we could reveal a diversity of trajectories. We identified three pathways: (1) youth offenders, (2) early adult-onset offenders and (3) late adult-onset offenders. Remarkably, quite a lot of women are late starters. Three risk factors – to a greater or lesser extent – play a role in these pathways: a problematic educational situation in childhood, drugs and negative love affairs.