My crisis theory was publicly proposed in 1980 to explain why even the youths who do not have any serious home problems and/or personality disorders do evil deeds, and why delinquency tends to occur in adolescence.

I use, for this purpose, three kinds of facters(basic crises, personal or situational crises and life cycle crises). Delinquency or crime is considered as one of the reactions a person takes against these sometimes conbined crises.

Adolescents have a developmental task“becoming an adult”, which consists of four sub-tasks; establishment of sex-role, parental separation, joining the members and orientaring of the way of life. Young adolescents are very anxious of becoming adults, for they have hardly any experience as adults. This consists of the adolescenct crisis.

Normal, less deprivated adoloescents challenge the task by three kinds of ways; taking in advance adult, rejecting maturity and these midway.

Delinquency may generate from any way, but most from the taking in advance adult way. They use delinquency as an instrument or initiation rites for becoming adults. They make experimentation and demonstration of full-grown person, or pararize their consciousness of life target diffusion through delinquency.

The adolescents who have so far been well adjusted do misdeeds mostly during a period of fourteen to seventeen years old, but they soon overcome such childish deeds, and thereafter become well-adjusted men.

“Self-explanations” amoung inmates were examined from the point of view of the impression management theory by Tedeschi et al (1981). Seeing that the situation in correctional institution is fundamentally conceived as “identity-threatening situation” for the inmates, this impression managament theory is expected to present an available frame work to interprete their explanations of their own criminal behaviors. In consequence, Tedeschi’s theory was recognized to be only partially available to interprete the self-explanations by prisoners or delinquent inmates. In order to understand their self-explanations entirely, it is necessary to add some other categories of impression management strategy and tactics.

The number of stimulant(methamphetamine) abusers in our country is on a continuous increase now and this tendency is one of our serious social problems.

There are two purposes in this study; One is to clarify the traits of stimulant-dependent prisoners and another is to understand the psycho-social factors of stimulant dependence.

On this study fifty male prisoners were used as subjects who had used stimulant drurgs more than five hundred times for a period of over five years.

The statistical data on the subjects was analyzed by making a comparison with two different control groups of prisoners; First, a group with experience in the occasional use of stimulant drugs, secondly, a group with no experience in the use of stimulant drugs.

The results of this research were summarized as follows;

(1) The major conditions that prisoners involved with stimulant abuse were; their connection with violent gangs(YAKUZA), living in idleness, having early criminal careers, and/or personality traits of over-activity.

(2) The personal factors causing stimulant dependence were; their abuse of stimulants to avoid unpleasant feelings, abuse at a young age, involvement with first delinquency during late teens, and vanity or lack of strong will type of personality.

The following personal factors for people in general, with stimulant dependence were found to be important; a socially immature personality(i.e. dependent and/or narcissistic), contact with delinquent subculture in adolescence(confusion of self-identification), and the lack of ability to control their emotions during difficult times.