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Gender, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Edwards's Women on Trial
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1986
References
1 U.S., Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Report to the National on Crime and Justice (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1983).Google Scholar
2 E.g., Candace Kruttschnitt, Sex and Criminal Court Dispositions: The Unresolved Controversy, 21 Research Crime & Delinq. 213 (1984); Christy A. Visher, Gender, Police Arrest Decisions, and Notions of Chivalry, 21 Criminology 5 (1983); Matthew Zingraff& Randall Thomson, Differential Sentencing of Women and Men in the U.S.A., 12 Intern'l J. Soc. L. 401 (1984). Ilene Nagel and John Hagan provide a comprehensive reanalysis of this literature in Gender and Crime: Offense Patterns and Criminal Court Sanction, in Norval Morris & Michael Tonry, eds., Crime and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).Google Scholar
3 Smart, Carol, Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).Google Scholar
4 Edwards's first book, Female Sexuality and the Law (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981), discusses the problem of women and crime, but ranges much more broadly over medical and psychological opinion on female pathology. Other relevant works by Edwards are Sexuality, Sexual Offenses and Conceptions of Victims in the Criminal Justice Process, 8 Victimology 113 (1983), and her recent edited volume, Gender, Sex and the Law (London: Croom Helm, 1985), a series of discussion papers, two of which were written by Edwards.Google Scholar
5 Nagel, Ilene, Sex Differences in the Processing of Criminal Defendants, in Allison Morris & Lo-raine Gelsthorpe, eds., Women and Crime 104 (papers presented to the Cropwood Round-Table Conference, Dec. 1980) (Cambridge: Institute of Criminology, 1981).Google Scholar
6 Cesare Lombroso & W. Ferrero, The Female Offender (New York: Appleton, 1920); W. I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl (New York: Harper & Bros., 1923); Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1933). For a perceptive discussion of this literature see Cathy Spatz Widom, Perspectives of Female Criminality: A Critical Examination of Assumptions, in Morris & Gelsthorpe, supra note 5, at 33–46; see also Klein, Doris, The Etiology of Female Crime: A Review of the Literature, 8 Issues in Criminology 3 (1973).Google Scholar
7 See Widom, , supra note 6, at 35.Google Scholar
8 Pollak, Otto, The Criminality of Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); Kingsley Davis, Prostitution, in R. K. Merton & R. A. Nisbet, eds., Contemporary Social Problems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961); Gisela Konopka, Adolescent Girls in Conflict (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966). See also J. Cowie, V. Cowie, & E. Slater, Delinquency in Girls (London: Heinemann, 1968). Carol Smart, supra note 3, discusses these authors in ch. 3 of Women, Crime and Criminology.Google Scholar
9 See supra note 2 for examples.Google Scholar
10 These are conclusion of Nagel and Hagan reach in their analysis of the evidence from studies conducted before 1982. See Nagel & Hagan, supra note 2. The evidence published since that time appears to fall into the same pattern.Google Scholar
11 For a graphic portrayal of the impact of the informal sanctioning powers police and courts enjoy, see Arlene Carmen & Howard Moody, Working Women: The Subterranean World of Street Prostitution (New York; Harper & Row, 1985). For a broader, more scholarly treatment of this issue, see Freda Solomon, Factors Affecting Differing Dispositions of Urban Felony Cases: Sex as a Critical Variable (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1983).Google Scholar
12 See, e.g., Elizabeth R. Moulds, Chivalry and Paternalism: Disparities of Treatment in the Criminal Justice System, 31 W. Pol. Q. 416 (1978). Nagel & Hagan, supra note 2, at 136, suggest that we should begin to collect data that would permit “direct measurement of the sex role attitudes of decision makers.” These authors also complain of weaknesses in the conceptualization of independent variables in some research, a problem attributable in part to deficiencies in official case records. Such records vary quite dramatically in content, completeness, and reliability across jurisdictions and over time, confounding direct comparisons and making replication difficult.Google Scholar
13 Simon reports that prostitution ranks seventh in frequency among crimes committed by women; rape was not among the ten most common male crimes in her analysis. Rita James Simon, Women and Crime 45 (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975).Google Scholar
14 Mary Beth Norton, Is Clio a Feminist? The New History, N.Y. Times Book Rev., Apr. 13, 1986, at 1, 40.Google Scholar
15 Gender 'Justice”? Defending Defendants and Mitigating Sentence, in Edwards, Gender, supra note 4, at 131.Google Scholar
16 See, e.g., Susan K. Datesman & Frank R. Scarpitti, Female Delinquency and Broken Homes: A Reassessment, in Datesman & Scarpitti, eds., Women, Crime, and Justice 129 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
17 The standard for arrest in England, “reasonable suspicion,” is not as high as it is in the United States, nor have the English adopted an exclusionary rule to protect against unlawful arrests. A useful discussion of these due process issues can be found in Graham Hughes, English Criminal Justice: Is It Better than Ours? 26 Ariz. L. Rev. 507 (1984).Google Scholar
18 Lipetz, Marcia J., Routine Justice: Processing Cases in Women's Court (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books. 1984).Google Scholar
19 Id. at 24.Google Scholar
20 See Nagel & Hagan, supra note 2.Google Scholar
21 Some authors draw a distinction between premenstrual tension and premenstrual syndrome, treating the latter as encompassing the former. See Candy Pahl-Smith, Premenstrual Syndrome as a Criminal Defense: The Need for a Medico-legal Understanding, 15 N.C. Cent. L.J. 246 (1986). The discussion in this essay does not make that distinction.Google Scholar
22 Luckhaus, Linda, A Plea for PMT in the Criminal Law, in Edwards, Gender, supra note 4, at 159–82.Google Scholar
23 See generally ch. 3, Medical-legal Conundrums—the Legal Organizations of Physiological Difference.Google Scholar
24 This statement is from her 1985 essay, Gender “Justice,”in Edwards, ed., supra note 4, at 139. In that essay she criticizes judges who believe women have “ample remedies” to deal with an abusive spouse; she also notes that “from Blackstone onwards, it has been a far graver offence for the wife to kill the husband, than the husband to kill the wife,”id. at 144, and she cites statistics indicating that the vast majority of spousal homicide victims are female. (In 1982 in England, 104 victims were female; 12 were male!)Google Scholar
25 Adler, Freda, Sisters in Crime 16 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1975); see also Nagel & Hagan, supra note 2.Google Scholar
26 U.S. Department of Justice, supra note 1; Nagel & Hagan, supra note 2.Google Scholar
27 Adler, supra note 25, at 18.Google Scholar
28 Many commentators have noted this, e.g., Lipetz, supra note 18, in the study described above. For statistics on the economic and social status of female offenders see Nancy Wolfe, Francis Cullen, & John Cullen, Describing the Female Offender: A Note on the Demographics of Arrests, 12 J. Crim. Just. 483 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 Smart, Carol, The New Female Offender: Reality or Myth?in Barbara Price & Natalie J. Sokol-off, eds., The Criminal Justice System and Women 105–16 (New York: Clark Boardman, 1982).Google Scholar
30 Simon, Rita, supra note 13, at 108–10, e.g., surveyed 30 judges and prosecutors on trends in female criminality, rinding only 3 who mentioned the women's movement as a possible source of influence.Google Scholar
31 This is the explanation Carol Smart favors, supra note 3, at 73.Google Scholar
32 Kruttschnitt, supra note 2, offers some empirical evidence that this may already by occurring. Carrie Menkel-Meadow discusses this possibility in Portia in a Different Voice: Speculations on a Women's Lawyering Process, 1 Berkeley Women's L.J. 39 (1985).Google Scholar