Allison Evans Crim 012H: Final Paper May 3, 2011

What Do We Really Know About Women Criminals?

When learning about crime and criminals most people hear only about men committing criminal acts. Why is this? The lack of scientific attention to the problems presented by female offenders is probably due to the recurring observation that a considerably smaller number of women come into contact with the law than men. (Pollak) This makes sense, but it also leaves a huge gap in the information that we have about criminals and our understanding of crime. Granted there are not nearly as many women committing crimes; but there still are women criminals. Women represent about half of the U.S. population and live under conditions that may often protect them against the detection or prosecution of crime. These conditions suggest that female criminality deserves more research interest than it has received. (Pollak) Through out this past semester we have studied different crimes and theories that motivate people to commit crime. Yet there are very few statistics based just on women criminals. Again, why is this? In an age where scientists study everything, why is it that there are very few people who are studying women as criminals? Most information that I have found has either just been about men or has grouped the two genders together. But are male and female offenders really that similar? It seems that men and women are very different in many aspects, and therefore it seems plausible that men and women would be different when it comes to crime. Not only do differences exist between men and women, but there are also differences within the male criminal group itself. We have studied it.

Therefore, it seems plausible that there are differences that exist in the female criminal group as well. So I got to thinking, maybe the reason that there is so little information about women criminals is because women, as criminals, are relatively new to society. I thought it was possible that with the continued growth of equality between the genders, the female criminals have just now emerged due to their new place in society. I decided to take a basic offense one of the most commonly associated crimes with women, prostitution, and see if I could find even traces of this in our past. Even in the progressive era I found women committing crime. The most documented crime committed by women is, and has always been, prostitution; even back in the Progressive era. The only female criminal role discussed during the Progressive period is that of prostitution. (Block) These women were portrayed as lonely, detached, and confused female(s). (Block) Although by going back and looking at records kept by New Yorks Bureau of Social Morals we can see that women were doing more than just selling their bodies for money. According to these records there were 311 female criminals who were identified by the Bureau, along with many more male criminals. But for the women, they found 5 distinct groups of female criminals. Those solely involved in prostitution (prostitute); those who achieved a management position usually in vice operations or displayed special business skills such as fencing stolen goods or bail bonds (entrepreneur); those whose criminality was exclusively some form of stealing (thief); an exceptionally small group who were both whores and thieves (whore-thief); and those who worked a combination of vice, gambling and drug dealing (narc). (Block) The break down for these 311 female

criminals was: Prostitute (149), Entrepreneur (78), Thief (56), Whore-Thief (4), Narc (24). Although this was a large collection of criminal information for the time, most of the records, especially for the women, are incomplete. Most of the 311 female criminals are missing critical information like age and ethnicity, along with other pieces of information. There can be some guesses made by evaluating the names of the women (first and last) and by looking at the men they associate with (dating, marriage, or in business with), but we still cannot fill in all the missing pieces. This causes a problem when attempting to compare the women, as we would normally do with the men. But through the article we can still understand the thought process of individuals from this time. We can look at women and the motives of their criminal behavior. Although the Bureau was much more complete when recording and discussing male criminals, possibly due to the societal roles that women play (more male dominance, and women thought of more as property that equal to men). But the article was critical when it came to the male influence over women, who were involved in crime. The article does recognize women criminals of the progressive era as versatile offenders, but in this time there was, and still is, the belief that most women were involved with crime due to their brutal exploitation by men. Some people have the belief that women are too dainty and innocent to actual chose a life in crime. Therefore, there must be another reason why they are involved. One factor to consider, which is mentioned in the article, is the interaction of men (husband, boyfriend, pimp, or partner in crime) and the woman committing the crime. It is a common explanation that most women are involved in criminal activity because they are either forced or influenced by

men; some working side-by-side (partners in crime) and others being forced (pimps). But most people do not consider that women could have rationally and consciously chosen criminal careers (even prostitutes) as a path of upward mobility. (Block) For these women, the benefits could have outweighed the costs. They may have decided that the criminal life style was worth it to them. There is no evidence that all women who commit crime are weak and forced into this life by the brutal domination of men (Block); although it could and does happen on occasions. It seems to me that more women choose this life style for other reasons that compliance, just like criminal that are men. How do we explain women being involved in crime then? It seems that not all women are being forced into crime; some have made the rational choice to be involved in a criminal life style. So why does society still make excuses for women who become involved in crime? One study done at Emory University in 1982, had a theory that women are more impulsive than criminals that are men when it comes to violent crime (murder, manslaughter, assault); therefore women are treated less harsh in the criminal justice system. Their argument for this was that within industrialized societies women are presumed to be irrational, compulsive, and slightly neurotic. Furthermore, these traits predispose women to violations of the characterized by uncontrolled response to impulse. (Heilbrun) This article goes on to say, frustrations and other psychological disturbances were believed to weaken the inhibitions of women under uniquely female biological conditions (e.g. menstruation) with the result being more impulsive crimes; (Heilbrun) which brings into question whether women just go nuts and commit crime. To understand their theory and the experiment they set up to prove it, we first have to understand what is meant by an impulsive crime: a crime in which the thought

and instigation to act did not arise prior to the immediate situation involving the unlawful action. (Heilbrun) Next, they considered the records of 618 female criminals and 678 male criminals and rated their crimes on a scale of 1-4, [1] being clearly not planned and spontaneous and [4] being clearly planned and not spontaneous at all. They took into account information from all available sources (witnesses, victim, criminal, and the officers involved with both the crime and the arrest). The ratings were assigned by two graduate students and then compared to each other. According to their experiment the results suggest, support for the assumption of greater impulsiveness in female crime only for crimes involving physical violence. (Heilbrun) According to this study, when women commit violent crimes they fall into the category of the frustration-aggression theory. This study would indicate that these women did not rational think through their actions and just reacted due to a specific or a combination of events. But can we really conclude from this study that women are more impulsive solely based on the small amount of information produced and obtained by this study? We have seen, in more recent news, both men and women can commit the same crime. For example, a new mother drowns her newborn child and then a new father shakes his baby to death. To me both of these people seemed to snap and go nuts. Yet the difference really comes into play with the punishment, in my opinion. The man was sent to prison and the women was sent to a mental institution. This is a huge disparity of treatment between the genders, in my eyes. Its not the difference in the criminal (gender) or the criminal actions. The difference is the way society expects each gender to act, and the punishment for straying from the social norm.

In addition to the fact that this experiment seems to only take into consideration that just women can snap and go nuts, this experiment has some major flaws that could have affected the outcome. The first problem was the sources of the information used to calculate how impulsive the crime was. It does help that they were able to use more than one source (the criminal), but they based their rating of the crime solely on the information in the file for each criminal. The inherent problem with this approach is that there could be pieces of vital information missing from the file that might have altered the rating of the impulsivity of the crime. This experiment, as far as I can tell, also does not take into consideration the circumstances behind the crimes or any other factors that may have lead up to the crimes. Finally, the false generalization of this study is the assertion that women are impulsive because they are irrational, compulsive, slightly neurotic or even menstruating. I could potentially agree with these assertions if they had provided evidence to back up these claims. But this experiment did not deal with why women are impulsive, it simply tried to evaluate if women offenders are more impulsive than male offenders. This leaves a huge gap in the understanding of these so-called impulsive crimes. From these two different studies/ articles we cannot conclude that all women are forced into crime, nor can we conclude that women are impulsive when committing violent crimes. So what else are we missing? In order to complete the picture we have to have all the pieces. We need to understand the outside factors and study how these affect women. When trying to understand why women commit criminal acts we have to look at everything from childhood, upbringing, genetics, situational factors, and everything in between. There is not enough substantiated information on the factors behind why

women committing crime. This lack of information could be due to the smaller number of female offenders, but as time goes on there seems to be an increase in the number of women criminals that could and should be studied. Some would argue that studying just women is a waste of time. All the research done so far has produced similar results for men and women; therefore, there is no need to study just women criminals. There have been studies showing individuals in delinquency. This study found: the correlates of delinquency were similar in males and females. (Rowe) Other studies have just grouped both genders together and have produced similar results, concluding that men and women are similar in criminal aspects; but there are clear differences. Just look at the sentencing results for the two genders. Something has to be different. Other people will argue that women are not naturally criminals; they are nurturing not violent. These people would argue that women are driven into the life of crime by factors such as abuse, low socioeconomic status, lack of parent guidance, lack of education, drug or alcohol addiction, and other factors. In their eyes, these are broken women who are just fighting back and see no other choice but crime. But even if these are the reasons why become women involved with crime we still need to research and study why only a small number of women decide that it is necessary for them to become involved in criminal activity. Gender demands attention in the search for the origins of crime. (Rowe) We seem to find it important to study these factors for male criminals, so why is it less important when it comes to women who commit crime? Along with finding the origins of crime for women, I believe we also need to address and study how society looks and reacts to women as criminals. Most of the time

you hear that women, who are arrested, get off easier than men in our current criminal justice system. But why is this? Is it a societal problem, or a problem with the justice system? I also think we need to look into why, as a society, we feel the need to make an excuse or reason why women commit crime in the first place. There always seems to be an outside reason to justify why a woman commits a crime. Yet we do not feel the same need when it comes to male offenders. Although, when we do give explanations to crimes committed by men it is never with the notion that it was not his fault. For example, if a man gets in a fight we might say he was drunk, but the fight was still his fault. Yet if a woman gets arrested for being a prostitute she had to of been forced into it by a pimp. It seems that as a society we have no problem with men being detained and receiving the proper punishment because he broke the laws. Yet, when it comes to a woman, there has to be an outside factor that caused her to break out of the societal norm and commit a criminal act. Women criminal are not going to go away. Although women make up only about 11% of the jail population, their numbers have nearly tripled over the last ten years. (United States of America) Which indicates that more and more women are committing crime everyday causing more women to be imprisoned in jail. As a society we need to understand why more women are criminals. By looking at the chart, just in Pennsylvania from 1999-2009 there has been a 78.7% increase in women who have been imprisoned. Not all women are being forced into a life of crime. There could be some biological or hormonal factors, but there has to be other factors that we are not aware of yet. These are the unknown factors that demand the need to be studied in order to better understand the complete picture of todays crime and todays criminals.

Works Cited Anglin, Douglas M. "ADDICTED WOMEN AND CRIME* - ANGLIN - 2006 Criminology." Wiley Online Library. 2011. Web. 20 Apr. 2011. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.17459125.1987.tb00802.x/abstract>. Block, Alan. "Aw! Your Mother's in the Mafia: Women Criminals in Progressive New York." Contemporary Crises 1.1 (1977): 5-22. Print. Heilbrun, A. B. "Female Criminals: Behavior and Treatment within the Criminal Justice System." Criminal Justice and Behavior 9.3 (1982): 341-51. Print. Inmate Population in the Department of Corrections. 2011. Raw data. Pennsylvania. Pollak, O. "Abstracts Database." National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Web. 24 Apr. 2011. <http://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=134222>. Rowe, David C., Alexander T. Flannery, and Daniel J. Flannery. "Sex Differences In Crime: Do Means and Within-Sex Variation Have Similar Causes?" Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. 2011. Web. 24 Apr. 2011. <http://jrc.sagepub.com/content/32/1/84.short>. United States of America. Women in Jail: Classification Issues. By Tim Brennan and James Austin. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice, National Institute of Corrections, 1997. Print. ""Women and Crime": The Female Offender." Chicago Journals. The University of Chicago Press. Web. 20 Apr. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174358?seq=2>.