Summary
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Subject index
Scholarship in criminology over the last few decades has often left little room for research and theory on how female offenders are perceived and handled in the criminal justice system. In truth, one out of every four juveniles arrested is female, and the population of women in prison has tripled in the past decade. Co-authored by Meda Chesney-Lind, one of the pioneers in the development of the feminist theoretical perspective in criminology, The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime, Third Edition redresses these issues.
In an engaging style, authors Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko explore gender and cultural factors in women's lives that often precede criminal behavior and address the question of whether female offenders are more violent today than in the past. The authors provide a revealing look at how public discomfort with the idea of women as criminals significantly impacts the treatment received by this offender population. The text covers additional topics such the interaction of sexism, racism, and social class inequalities that results in an increase of female offenders, as well as the imprisonment binge that has resulted in an increasing number of girls and women being incarcerated.
Sentencing Women to Prison: Equality without Justice
Sentencing Women to Prison: Equality without Justice
More than one million women in the United States are under some form of criminal justice supervision in the United States (Glaze & Bonzcar, 2007). By 2009, the number of women imprisoned in the United States increased 800% over the past three decades, bringing the number of women behind bars to more than 105,000 (West, 2010). From 1995 to 2009 alone, the number of women behind prison bars increased 87%, and women now account for nearly 7% of the total prison population (see Table 6.1; Stephan, 2008; West & Sabol, 2010). More than a third of them served time in the nation's three largest jurisdictions: Texas, the federal system, and California (Glaze ...
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