NCJ Number
132248
Journal
Social Justice Volume: 17 Issue: 4 Dated: (Winter 1990) Pages: 106-123
Date Published
1990
Length
18 pages
Annotation
Women's lawbreaking and the academic, social, and political responses to it are discussed.
Abstract
The concerns of women and crime are: (1) that most previous explanations of crime are explanations of male crime; (2) how sexualized typifications of womanhood have affected the treatment of deviant women; (3) to campaign for a better deal for women before the courts or in prison; and (4) the desirability (or not) of a feminist jurisprudence. The limits to feminism/feminist theory is that such gender specification can imply that women-as-a-biological-grouping have essentially different reasons than do men for committing crimes. The "deconstructionist agnostic" position on women implies that specification of empirical referents at the outset of an inquiry must inevitably entail investigations forever trapped in categories that obstruct the production of new knowledge. The "deconstructionist/libertarian" stance implies a denial that a reduction in women's crime is a proper concern of criminologists and that they should not seek to justify policy proposals on the grounds that they might help criminal women keep out of trouble in the future. Left realists insist that individuals must take responsibility for their crimes. A major concern of left realism has been to counter the "impossibleness" of left idealist theories that claim that nothing can be done about crime until there is a fundamental change in the present exploitative class relations constitutive of capitalism. 48 references