Any Woman's Blues: A Critical Overview of Women, Crime, and the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

I. Introduction The changing nature of women's position in the workforce and in the family has given rise to a new set of issues concerning women's participation in crime. Among these are increasing rates of and fluctuating patterns in women's offenses, and growing resistance both through the emergence of political movements and through rising militance in women's prisons. These developments, in turn, have stimulated not only the portrayal of a new violent woman by the media, but also a flurry of speculation among criminologists. However, the great majority of academic material has lacked serious consideration of the economic and social position of women, and consequently has been limited by a narrow correctionalist perspective. Therefore, this article will present, in a more systematic and politically viable fashion, several key elements critical to a radical view of the phenomenon of female crime and experience with the criminal justice system. First, we will briefly critique the traditional criminological literature on women and describe how such scholarship has been utilized in the formulation of criminal justice planning, and will introduce the basic tenets of radical criminology and the developing body of feminist literature that shape the parameters of our analyses. Second, we will briefly sketch a picture of the position of women in contemporary American society, a picture that we regard as essential to any analysis of women and crime. We will then focus on the criminal justice system itself as an instrument of control and how it reflects and reinforces the particular position of women as well as the ideology of sexism. This section of the article will include an outline of female offenses, and the responses of the police, courts, and prisons, integrating an analysis of the factors that come into play in the treatment afforded women by these institutions. Furthermore, we will incorporate a critical discussion of what has been referred to as chivalry and benevolence toward women offenders, and lay the groundwork for an alternative view of differential treatment of women with reference to their political and economic position. These ideas will be utilized to illustrate our main points about the exploitative character of American justice, and more important, to raise some of the relevant burning questions for future investigation and practice. II. The Criminologist's Study of Women and Crime Cried all, Before such things can come, You idiotic child, You must alter Human Nature! And they all sat back and smiled. --Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Similar Cases A. Traditional Criminology: Serving the State In order to locate the theoretical underpinnings of our critical overview of women and crime, it is first essential to summarize and critique the role that traditional criminology has played in service to the state. Criminologists have almost unanimously accepted the legal definition of crime (1) and have centered primarily on the individual offender, who has been regarded as abnormal, in fact as inherently pathological. The conclusions drawn are that ill-adjusted individuals in conflict with society, in other words deviants, must be psychologically rehabilitated by the criminal justice system. This ahistorical, individualistic approach of academic criminologists has contributed to and has been reinforced by their close relationships with the criminal justice system in policy formulation. These mutually reinforcing tendencies are evidenced by the kinds of research grants they receive (for example, from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration), from the types of studies conducted in prisons at the invitation of the staff, (2) and by the rise of the number of criminal justice schools across the country that are training professional administrators. As far as the subject of women and crime is concerned, its sparse body of literature has been written either by men or by women without feminist consciousness. …

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