Mann, Coramae (1931–2004)

Coramae Richey Mann was a scholar in the areas of women and race and crime and the criminal justice system. Her career spanned 2 decades and included numerous awards and several books, chapters in books, scholarly articles, and other types of writings. Her books include Female Crime and Deliquency (1984), Unequal Justice: A Question of Color (1993), When Women Kill (1996); she coauthored Images of Color, Images of Crime (2nd ed., 2002) with Marjorie Zatz. Mann's work emphasized that not only do minority women have a different experience from White men, but each minority group has its own unique experience. This entry provides biographical information on Mann as well as a review of her research and a discussion of her scholarly contributions.

Mann was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 25, 1931. She received her undergraduate degree in 1956 and a graduate degree in 1961, both in clinical psychology from Roosevelt University. In 1976, Mann earned a PhD in sociology with an emphasis in criminology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She spent her academic career first at Florida State University, where she was the only African American female on the faculty, and then at Indiana University-Bloomington, where she helped establish a PhD program in criminology. While at Indiana University, she recruited and mentored minority faculty. She retired from Indiana University-Bloomington and academics in 1996. Mann died in 2004, after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

In her book Unequal Justice: A Question of Color, Mann called attention to the need of a “minority view” on crime and the criminal justice system. She outlined three requirements for the application of a minority view. First, she discussed the need to identify and discuss the effects of violence, discrimination, and oppression that exist in the lives of minorities in America. Her work, in particular, looked at the unique experiences of each minority group in America. Second, Mann outlined several methodological requirements, which include qualitative methods to bring context and meaning to minority research. In addition, she saw a need to do in-group comparisons rather than evaluating behavior of minorities according to conventional definitions and labels. Mann called for greater participation in research by minority scholars in order to bring their definitions into the field of criminology. Finally, Mann was a proponent of the discrimination thesis that disputed the position of those such as William Wilbanks, who argued that the criminal justice system was not racist.

Mann's book Female Crime and Delinquency discusses female deviance and analyzes females' processing through the criminal justice system. At the time of her analysis, biological explanations of female crime were popular. Mann challenged these assertions, successfully discrediting the idea that female offenders were more masculine than women in the general population. In addition, she challenged the idea that female crime was a result of the women's liberation movement. Mann concluded that the criminal justice system systematically discriminates against women, both as juveniles and adults. Moreover, she pointed out that laws and policies that were gender specific, such as sexual misconduct, were disproportionately applied to women. Methodologically, she contributed to the literature by analyzing women as part of their ethnic groups, comparing them to White women, and found many differences. She began her discussion about female criminals by challenging the then-current research that described women as unique, and both physically and psychologically different from men. Mann argued for a holistic approach, one that could explain all crime and delinquency and perhaps lead to a gender-neutral theory.

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