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The study of gender and crime has grown exponentially over the past 40 years, but in some fundamental respects, it remains underdeveloped. Few scholars have considered both the similarities and the differences in the predictors of offending among males and females and the implication of this for middle‐range theories. Victimization has been put forth as a major explanatory factor for female offending; yet the study of female victimization has been ghettoized because it has failed to address the ways in which it is related to the larger literature of victimization. Female inmates have always been characterized as having special needs, but the basic necessities (housing and employment) inmates require once they are released from prison are in fact gender neutral. These bodies of research all have suggested that the salience of gender varies in different contexts and is intermixed with other forms of stratification. As such, we would do well to attend to those situations and relational processes that foreground gender and focus our efforts on where gender‐based paradigms are important and can have a real impact.

Beginning with the last review of gender and crime that appeared in the Annual Review of Sociology (1996), I examine the developments in the more traditional approaches to this subject (the gender ratio problem and the problem of theoretical generalization), life course research, and feminist research (gendered pathways, gendered crime, and gendered lives). This review highlights important insights that have emerged in this work on gender and crime, and it considers how this work might be further enriched by drawing on sociological theories that can address how gendered lives shape the impetus and opportunities for offending. This includes work on the context of offending, the learning and expression of emotions, and identity theory.

Drawing on a number of theories, this paper explores both why and how the capacity for collective action influences deviance processing decisions. Specifically, data for a sample of male and female defendants convicted of both theft and forgery offenses are examined to estimate the effects on criminal processing decisions of (1) the organizational, as opposed to the individual, victim, (2) the organization of individual offenders, as indicated by the presence of co‐defendants, and (3) the respective intimacy in the victim‐offender relationship on both the organizational and the individual level. While organization on the part of the criminal offenders appears to have no effect on the dispositional process, the presence of an organizational victim ensures longer periods of probationary supervision for the respective offender. Moreover, this relationship remains regardless of whether the defendant was involved with the organization he victimized. Accordingly, this study suggests both that businesses are in fact treated differently from individuals in the criminal courtroom and that the expansion of our analysis of victim attributes in the study of deviance processing decisions is long overdue.

AbstractThis article seeks to show how economic dependency, a characteristic which is particularly representative of a woman's location in social life, is related to the outcome of criminal prosecution. A stratified random sample of 1034 cases of women offenders was drawn from the files of on Adult Probation Deportment in northern California. Based on multiple regression analysis, the findings give tentative support to the expectation that sentencing disparities within offense categories can be predicted from the degree to which a woman is economically dependent upon someone else for her day‐to‐day existence: the more dependent she is. the less severe her disposition.

In recent decades, the nature of criminal punishment has undergone change in the United States. This case study of women serving time in California in the 1960s and 1990s examines key points in this recent history. In this 2005 book, the authors begin with a look at imprisonment at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official discourse. They compare women's experiences in the 1990s, at the California Institution for Women and the Valley State Prison, when the recent 'get tough' era was near its peak. Drawing on archival data, interviews, and surveys, their analysis considers the relationships among official philosophies and practices of imprisonment, women's responses to the prison regime, and relations between women prisoners. The experiences of women prisoners reflected the transformations Americans have witnessed in punishment over recent decades, but they also mirrored the deprivations and restrictions of imprisonment

Twenty years ago, David Downes in his classic study, Contrasts in Tolerance, interviewed Dutch prisoners held in England and English prisoners held in the Netherlands and concluded that the Dutch provided a more humane penal system. Since that time, there have been significant changes in penal policies in both England and the Netherlands, which call into question both his conclusions and many of the current comparative analyses of penal trends. We examine the conditions of confinement for both Dutch prisoners held in English prisons and English prisoners held in the Netherlands to determine whether and how these carceral environments have changed over time. We draw on recent organizational research on 'inhabited institutions' to help advance our understanding of both transformations and continuities in penal trends across different political contexts.

A rise in governmentality, the development of the risk society and shifts in cultural sensibilities have all been used to explain recent trends in crime control and penal policies most notably in the USA and in England and Wales. Despite the importance of this discourse, we see it as flawed in two respects: (1) it has left the experiences of those who are living out these transformations on the sidelines; and (2) when these experiences are addressed, attention is directed primarily to the experiences of male offenders. We examine indicators of the mental health of 2911 women held in two prisons in California and three prisons in England to determine whether and how different aspects of prison life and prisoners' experiences affect their well-being and whether generalities about transnational changes in penal life are warranted.