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Global-level data suggests that the number of women and girls in prison is growing and at a faster rate than the male prison population is. In order to meaningfully address this shift in female deviance and criminalization, more attention should be given on the specific ways that women and girls are labeled “deviants” and subsequently criminalized. Women and girls have been criminalized, imprisoned, and harshly punished for “moral” offenses such as adultery or premarital sex or for violations of dress codes or even for being a member of the LGBTQ community. Women and girls have also been reportedly been imprisoned for running away from their homes (often from abusive situations), for being raped, and even for being forced into prostitution. Furthermore, victims of domestic violence or sex trafficking and sex workers have been administratively detained or simply detained for seeking asylum, having committed no crime. The feminist criminological perspective has widened an understanding of all forms of female deviance. This perspective stresses the importance of contextual analysis and of incorporating unique experiences of women and girls at the intersection of not only gender, race, class, and ethnicity but also nationality, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and immigration or migration status, and against the backdrop of national as well as international conflict. Now the challenge is develop effective solutions both to address female victimization and to end the silencing of women and girls through criminalization on a global level. Effective implementation of a gender-mainstreaming strategy, adopted in United Nations policies such as “the Bangkok Rules,” is one of the proposed solutions.

Book Review: Barbara Owen, James Wells, and Joycelyn Pollock, In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women's Imprisonment. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. ISBN: 9780520288720 (Paperback). 260 Pages. $29.95.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2017 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]When the United States embarked on a policy of mass incarceration during the waning decades of the twentieth century, few considered the impact that this correctional course change would have on women. Women offenders had been largely invisible or "forgotten" by a criminology that emerged to complement, explain, and occasionally critique state efforts to control and discipline unruly and dangerous men. In the classic texts on crime, women literally "disappeared" from data sets, from discussions of crime patterns, and most importantly for this discussion from life behind "bars." For centuries, very often, little or no thought was given to the possibility of a female prisoner until she appeared at the door of the institution (Rafter 1990). It was as though crime and punishment existed in a world in which gender equaled male, and women were correctional afterthoughts, at best.Some of this intellectual and institutional neglect was understandable. For most of the last century, we imprisoned only about five to ten thousand women (Calahan 1986). In 1980, there were just over 12,000 women in U.S. state and federal prisons and they constituted only 3.9 percent of those in prisons. After decades of mass imprisonment, though, there are now over one hundred thousand women in U.S. prisons (111,495 in 2015), and these women accounted for 7.2 percent of those in prison (Carson and Anderson, 2016: 5). In four decades, the number of women being held in the nation's prisons increased nearly ten-fold and the women's imprisonment boom was born. What had started as a "war on drugs" quickly morphed into an unannounced and unplanned reshaping of the women's correctional landscape, and what some have dubbed a "war on women" (Bloom, Chesney-Lind, and Owen, 1994).After this draconian policy shift, it is probably appropriate to take stock of the state of women's imprisonment in the United States. In Search of Safety: Confronting Inequality in Women's Imprisonment by Barbara Owen, James Wells, and Joycelyn Pollock is a timely and sobering assessment of what mass imprisonment has meant for women behind bars in our country. One could hardly have asked for a better team to compile the assessment. Both Owen and Pollock are authors of highly respected books on the topic of women's imprisonment; Owen's In the Mix which is a classic ethnography of a woman's prison, and Pollock's classic Women, Prison and Society is a highly respected compendium of the history and current state of women's imprisonment. Wells brings to this group a wealth of first hand experience as a former correctional officer who has extensive experience assessing sexual safety in correctional facilities, and an impressive track record for obtaining external grants.Importantly, the book relies on three federally funded studies on the nation's conditions of confinement, with a focus on sexual abuse and assault: an National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study that collected qualitative data from staff at twelve facilities housing men and women, a second NIJ study that examined "sexual violence" in women's prisons using 40 focus groups (with approximately 150 respondents) in four states, and finally an National Institute of Corrections (NIC) study that conducted a survey of "over 4000 women prisoners" held in fifteen "dispersed federal, state, county, and private correctional facilities" (15). They also, importantly, conducted a content analysis of fifty letters sent to the "Just Detention International" detailing women's experiences with sexual assault while imprisoned. …

Most of the increase in women’s arrests is accounted for by more arrests of women for non-violent property offenses such as shoplifting, check forgery, welfare fraud, as well as for substance abuse offenses such as driving under the influence of alcohol and, as we shall see later, drug offenses. Data on the characteristics of women in prison as well as an examination of trends in women’s arrests suggest that factors other than a shift in the nature of women’s crime are involved in the dramatic increases in women’s imprisonment. The first large-scale and organized imprisonment of women occurred in the US when many women’s reformatories were established between 1870 and 1900. The profiles of women under lock and key, at both national and local levels, suggest that women’s crime has not gotten more serious. In California, the Senate Concurrent Resolution 33 Commission on Female Inmate and Parolee Issues examined the needs of women offenders.

This paper argues for a broader consideration of the issue of abortion—one that stresses the centrality of the denial of reproductive rights in the patriarchal policing of women’s bodies and their sexuality. Globally, the estimates of abortion-related deaths in 2014 ranged from 22,500 to 44,000, and countless women are injured or left infertile by seeking illegal abortions. We briefly review international trends regarding abortion politics and then analyze closely women’s access to abortion in two countries: the United States and Bangladesh. Representing two very different contexts of the developed and the developing world, respectively, we contend that abortion services are being constrained by misogynistic politics that deny women control over their bodies. Finally, the paper reviews recent international efforts to establish abortion rights as part of a broader landscape of human rights. Notably, while there are some efforts in the global north to recriminalize both contraception and abortion, these pra...

Police accountability is among the most prominent criminal justice issues in America today. Accounts of police misconduct captured by new communication and information technologies have played a central role in elevating this issue. On the continental US, the Black Lives Matter movement has driven these events, lodging the political debate in the larger context of racial inequality. In Hawaii, a parallel but distinctive series of events has occurred. A push for greater police accountability has emerged, but it has been more closely associated with gender relations than race relations and has involved women in political office rather than street protests. The Hawaii case also provides some generalizable lessons, particularly regarding the context-specific roles that gender and race relations play, and the potential for video evidence in promoting police reform.

Although there exists a growing body of research on female delinquents, few studies have investigated extensively the life courses of young women with histories of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE). Adding to the pathways perspective to offending literature, this article examines the narratives of young women with histories of CSE, emphasizes what they interpret as turning points, and illustrates their criminal trajectories as a “gauntlet.” This article presents a case study of six female offenders with histories of commercial sexual exploitation. Interviewees identified disrupted relationships with their mothers, early experiences of sexual abuse, and justice involvement as turning points toward their “gauntlet” of CSE and criminality. In addition, intergenerational normalization of drug abuse and violence in their homes, economic and racial marginalization, and absence of nurturing relationships led to interviewees’ interpretations of their lives as limited in agency, freedom, and change and filled with criticism, constriction, and punishment. Such interpretations preceded their return to offending behaviors. The pathways perspective to understanding sexually exploited female offenders is an important contribution in the field of feminist criminology. When combined with understanding young women’s turning points toward delinquency and CSE and their perceived effect of system involvement, the pathways perspective underscores the constraint and challenges these young women express as they navigate their communities, approach relationships, and return to criminality.

Criminology has historically exhibited a significant gender bias. Yet, spurred by feminist efforts, criminology has become more gender-inclusive recently. Research has documented this bias, and gains made by women. However, much of this research examines only gender bias, ignoring other important factors such as race. In this article, we examine gender and racial bias in criminology, conceptualizing the discipline as a Bourdieusian field, characterized by hierarchically arranged positions. We find that though women are present in nearly equal numbers to men, non-White people have a more limited presence, and White men dominate in positions endowed with the highest amounts of prestige and power.

This article briefly explores the disconnect between the global discourse on girls’ issues, which really focuses on girls’ rights, and most particularly their right to be free from victimization, and the American focus on girls, which is far more concerned with bad or violent girls. Specifically, the article reviews the increase in girls’ arrests in the United States for offenses like simple assault and the concomitant increase in girls’ share of juvenile court populations. Arguing that the maltreatment of girls is at the heart of such a shift, the article reviews current data on the prominence of cross-over or dual status youth (youth who have experienced both victimization and criminalization) in the female court population. Presenting evidence that the failure to protect American girls from harm is related to these patterns, the article concludes with a gender-responsive program that focuses on reducing harm to girls so as to prevent their future delinquency.

As we consider the election of Donald Trump as President Elect of the United States, there is perhaps no better time to reflect on the role of the state, and particularly the criminal system, in th...

In the 1990s, honor-based violence (HBV), and in particular honor killings, began receiving extensive international media attention. However, HBV includes a broad continuum of mechanisms used to control women and girls with varying levels of severity. Attention directed toward HBV has portrayed communities from South Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa in culturally rigid ways, where Orientalist discourses fail to demonstrate diversity. This essay will draw on small group interviews conducted with 27 adolescent girls and young women from diverse Asian backgrounds living in Auckland, New Zealand. Findings will illustrate the varied ways that research participants and their families negotiate gender and gender violence, with some adhering to a range of cultural norms supporting HBV and others diverging from an HBV culture.

This paper examines a case of trial by media revolving around a routine property crime in Hawaii. Trial by media is an emerging concept in crime media research; it illuminates how 21st-century mediascapes facilitate dynamic and interactive representations of crime, which may create spaces for alternative justice processes. Here we examine the impact of one victim’s efforts to identify a house burglar by sharing surveillance photos of the crime itself on the Internet, and the ensuing consequences. We chart how images of this relatively minor property crime circulated on the Internet through social media and eventually became a significant story for local corporate news. We also explore the consequences of this process, both in terms of restorative justice and surveillance research. Specifically, we document the way that social media presents opportunities outside of the criminal justice process for redress of grievances. We also, though, document how social media can create a forum for both racist and hate speech around criminals and those perceived to be criminal, and finally, we consider the ambiguous implications of using personal surveillance technologies as primary crime prevention strategies.

There is no denying the fact that female violence fascinates the general public at the same time that it perplexes feminist scholars (White and Kowalski 1994). Certainly, the possibility that women might begin to emulate male violence is a potent, albeit potential challenge to women’s universal domination by men. The fact is, however, that girls’ and women’s violence is a relative rarity. As an example, women killers have accounted for about 10-15 percent of all homicides for centuries (Holmlund 1994:131), and there is even some evidence that the number of adult women killing men actually decreased rather sharply in the last few years (Dawson and Langan 1994; Bureau of Justice Statistics 1998). One estimate of this decline is 25 percent (Holmlund 1994:131).