Patriarchy, Crime, and Justice: Feminist Criminology in an Era of Backlash

starting points:

• publication of key journal issues and books in the 1970s

• founding of the Women and Crime Division of the American Society of Criminology in 1982

20th century: looking back, looking forward

• prior to the start of feminist crim:

  • gender violence (sexual assualt, sexual harrassment, wife abuse) was ignored, minimized, and trivialized

  • girl and women criminals were overlooked / excluded in mainstream works AND demonized, masculinized, and sexualized in that literature

• the naming of the types and dimensions of female victimization had a significant impact on public policy

• had to deal with the masculinization/emancipation hypothesis of women’s crime

  • argues that women are demanding equal opportunity in the crime world the same way they are demanding equal opportunity in fields of legitimate endeavor

  • ultimately concluded to be incorrect

• 80s and 90s saw breakthrough research

  • documentation of girls’ participation in gangs

  • role of sexual and physical victimization in girls’ and women’s pathways into women’s crime

  • gender and race create unique pathways for girl and women offenders into crime

  • masculinity and crime need to be both theorized and researched

• contemporary approaches to gender and crime

  • avoid the problems of reductionism and determinism

  • stress the complexity, tentativeness, and variability with which people negotiate gender identity

  • society and social life are patterned on the basis of gender

  • the gender order is complex and shifting

feminist criminology and the backlash

• crime used in politics

  • politicians waging wars on crime that really meant wars on race

  • “moral values”

    • designed to appeal to right-wing christians

    • recriminalization of abortion

    • denial of civil rights to gay and lesbian americans

  • to challenge right-wing initiatives, the field of fem crim must

    • put a greater priority on theorizing patriarchy and crime

    • focus on the ways that the definition of the crime problem and criminal justice practices support patriarchal practices and worldviews

african american women account for almost half of all incarcerated women

media demonization and the masculinization of female offenders

• the second wave of feminism had triggered an array of conservative political, policy, and media responses

  • steady stream of media stories about violent and bad girls

  • masculinization theory: the same forces that propel men into violence will increasingly produce violence in girls and women once they are freed from the constraints of their gender

  • issues with this:

    • girls’ violence was not increasing

    • it created a self-fulfilling prophecy

    • the criminal justice system was harder on girls because of it

criminalizing victimization

• mandatory arrest in domestic assault cases

  • win bc domestic assault was finally becoming criminalized

  • loss because victim advocates had to work with the police and prosecutors, which they distrusted

  • in the mid 80s there was overwhelming evidence that arrest decreased violence against women

    • later proven that arrest was far less effective than originally thought

    • arrests for adult women increased by 30%

    • arrests for adult men fell by 5.8%

    • mutual arrests: arresting both parties in a domestic violence incident if it’s unclear who the primary aggressor is

    • fighting back against domestic violence was now also considered domestic violence

    • men use the system to intimidate and control their wives

women’s imprisonment and the emergence of vengeful equity

• women’s imprisonment rates are soaring far more than women’s crime rates

• began at the same time that the US dropped the idea of rehabilitation

  • exploited the public fear of crime to adopt the manner of mean-spirited crime policies

• vengeful equity: treating women offenders as though they were men, particularly when the outcome is punitive

  • pregnant women are shackled to the bed while giving labor

  • women’s boot camps

• institutional subcultures in women’s prisons make it unlikely that women will speak out against abuse

  • encourage correctional officers to cover for each other

  • inadequate protected accorded to women who file complaints

  • public stereotype of women in prison makes it hard for her to support her case in court

  • cos punishing women inmates for offenses that would be ignored in male prisons