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Recent scholarship raises two questions about the historical relationship between gender and official responses to criminality. First, to what extent has the formal social control of women changed in the past two centuries? Second, to what extent can changes in the presence of women within the criminal justice system be traced to the same factors that account for the changing presence of men? To address these questions, I focus on women incarcerated for felonies in a southern state (Georgia) between 1870 and 1940. Along with a comparable sample of male offenders, this population forms the basis of a time‐series analysis that compares, and seeks to account for, trends in admission rates. The analysis yields little evidence that women disappeared from formal system of punishment. Instead, there were gender similarities in punishment trends and in explanations for those trends. Concluding the paper is a discussion of its implications for further research on gender differences in punishment.

Economic threat figures prominently in recent explanations of lethal social control directed against blacks after the Civil War. As the position of whites and blacks became more similar, racial antagonisms intensified and found expression in efforts to suppress and intimidate blacks through lynchings and executions. This paper applies the economic threat hypothesis to the exercise of nonlethal social control in Georgia between 1874 and 1936. Time series analysis indicates that declines in racial inequality slightly increased racial disparities in incarceration. More noticeably, they decreased the black male incarceration rate and increased its white counterpart. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications of the results.

This paper explores the extent to which the social background of judges affects their sentencing behavior. An analysis of data on felons convicted in Georgia suggests that background has little direct bearing on sentencing outcomes. Instead, it conditions the weight judges attach to legally relevant and social background factors. Expectations about the role of the judge's age, religion, prior prosecutorial experience, and local background received mixed support. Older judges were selectively more punitive than their younger colleagues, but they did not direct this punitiveness toward disadvantaged offenders. Nor was there evidence that male judges were paternalistic toward female offenders. Baptist and Fundamentalist judges also sentenced more punitively, but they were not more likely than other judges to discriminate against black or disadvantaged offenders. Rather, they appeared to hold white and older offenders to a higher standard of behavior. Former prosecutors were selectively punitive and applied the law more uniformly than nonprosecutors. Local judges appeared to be more responsive to public demands for incarceration and sentenced more particularistically. These results illustrate the importance of considering judicial background in conjunction with case attributes, and they underscore the need for research that increases our understanding of judicial background as a conditioner of differential treatment during sentencing.

Past or Future Crimes: Deservedness and Dangerousness in the Sentencing of Criminals by Andrew von Hirsch.Confronting Crime: An American Challenge by Elliot Currie.The Great American Crime Myth by Kevin N. Wright. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

This paper draws attention to the common‐law distinction between felonies and misdemeanors. It asks whether this distinction, when drawn on the level of formal criminal procedure, has its counterpart on the informal level, in the use of different criteria to decide whether and how to prosecute the defendant. Analysis of data from the District of Columbia indicates that the felony‐misdemeanor distinction clearly conditions the role of both legally relevant and irrelevant factors, but not in the simple straightforward way initially hypothesized. The paper concludes with a discussion of the empirical and theoretical implications of the findings.

Traditionally, deviance research and theory have focused almost exclusively on the personal attributes of the alleged deviant. This paper questions the appropriateness of such a focus when examining the organizational processing of criminal defendants. It directs attention to situational contingencies that provide the context within which personal attributes and behaviors become meaningful and salient during labeling and sanctioning. Discussion focuses on a strategic but often neglected contingency, conviction method. Empirical analysis reveals that the way in which the defendant was convicted has strong implications for the criteria officials use later to label and sanction the defendant. The implications of these findings for deviance research are then discussed.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- Part One: Introduction -- Chapter 1: Problems and Prospects in the Study of Inequality, Crime, and Social Control -- Part Two: Directions for Theory -- Chapter 2: The Theoretical Bases for Inequality in Formal Social Control -- Chapter 3: Modeling the Conflict Perspective of Social Control -- Chapter 4: Rethinking and Unthinking "Social Control -- Chapter 5: The Police: Symbolic Capital, Class, and Control -- Part Three: Dimensions of Inequality -- Chapter 6: Ethnicity: The Forgotten Dimension of American Social -- Chapter 7: Gender and Punishment Disparity -- Chapter 8: Gender, Class, Racism, and Criminal Justice: Against Global and Gender-Centric Theories, For Poststructuralist Perspectives -- Part Four: Linkages Among Forms of Social Control -- Chapter 9: Labor Markets and the Relationships Among Forms of the Criminal Sanction -- Chapter 10: Gender, Race, and Social Control: Toward an Understanding of Sex Disparities in Imprisonment -- Chapter 11: Lethal Social Control in the South: Lynchings and Executions Between 1880 and 1930 -- Chapter 12: Double Jeopardy: The Abuse and Punishment of Homeless Youth -- Part Five: Human Agency -- Chapter 13: Eugenics, Class, and the Professionalization of Social Control -- Chapter 14: Children in the Therapeutic State: Lessons for the Sociology of Deviance and Social Control -- Chapter 15: Crime and the Social Control of Blacks: Offender/Victim Race and the Sentencing of Violent Offenders -- Chapter 16: The Symbolic Punishment of White-Collar Offenders -- References -- About the Book -- About the Editors and Contributors -- Index

Using a sample of felons convicted in Georgia between 1976 and June 1982, this study examines rural‐urban diyerences in sentencing. Consistent with previous research, it is found that ostensibly similar oflenders are punished diflerently, depending on whether they were convicted in urban rather than rural counties. Diyerences in outcomes are based both on social background and on factors of explicit legal relevance. They occur for decisions about the type and duration of punishment. Finally, they persist even when selected correlates and consequences of urbanization are controlled. Unlike earlier research, however, this study finds that urbanization usually intensijes rather than reduces differential treatment. The paper concludes with possible explanations for the particularism that appears to characterize urban rather than rural courts. Also considered are the theoretical and empirical implications of the findings.