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The current research analyzed the relationship between methamphetamine use and violence. Interviews were conducted with a sample of 205 respondents. The research was based on life history interviews with individuals who used methamphetamine for a minimum of three months and who resided in Los Angeles County. Of the 205 respondents, 55 (26.8%) had committed violence while under the influence of methamphetamine. Males comprised two thirds of the 55 respondents (N=36). Of the total sample, 30% of males and 23% of females committed methamphetamine-related violence, respectively. Overall, the 55 respondents reported 80 separate violent events while using methamphetamine. Of these 80 events, 41 (51.4%) acts of violence involved domestic relationships, 28.6% (N=23) of the violent events were drug related, 8.6% (N=7) were gang related, and 11.3% (N=9) involved random acts of violence (e.g., road rage, stranger assault). The study findings suggest that methamphetamine use heightens the risk for violence. Everyone interviewed agreed that methamphetamine has clear abuse and violence potential. Having said this, it is crucial to state that there was no evidence of a single, uniform career path that all chronic methamphetamine users follow. Progression from controlled use to addiction is not inexorable. Furthermore, a significant number of sample members experienced limited or no serious social, psychological, or physical dysfunction as a result of their methamphetamine use. Most germane to this study, we found that violence is not an inevitable outcome of even chronic methamphetamine use.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction: Our Journey into the World of Women and Violent Crime -- Earlier Conceptualizations -- Overview of the Book -- 2 Crime and Urban Distress: Patterns of Violent Offending -- Sex, Race, Age, and Violent Offending -- Making Sense of Race and Violent Street Crime -- Understanding Women's Participation in Violent Street Crime -- Notes -- 3 Getting into Crime and Violence -- The Distressed Community -- Social Disorder -- The Distressed Family -- Life in School -- Distress During Adolescence -- Notes -- 4 Work and Crime and Crime as Work -- The Secondary Nature of Secondary Labor Market Participation -- The Initial Work Experience -- The Intermingling of Licit and Illicit Work -- Crime on the Side -- Commitment to the Illegal Economy -- Notes -- 5 The What, Where, When, Why, and Who of Violent Events -- Robbery -- Assault -- The Context of Violence -- Notes -- 6 Getting Out of Crime and Violence -- Resolving to Stop -- Breaking Away from the Life -- Maintaining a Conventional Life -- The Desistance Process -- Notes -- 7 Breaking with the Past: Challenging Assumptions About Women and Violent Crime -- Gender, Crime, and Neighborhood Decline -- A Rational Policy -- Notes -- Appendix: Research Methods and Sample Description -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

It has been contended that women's participation in drug markets has had a tremendous impact on female involvement in nondrug crimes, especially such violent offenses as robbery and assault. Systemic violence in drug selling, however, may be spuriously related to other etiological factors in violence and crime commission, rather than a function of social processes unique to drug selling. Violence within and apart from the context of drug dealing is compared for women involved in various types of drug distribution activities. Life history interviews were conducted with 156 female drug sellers from two New York City neighborhoods. The findings suggest that violence among drug sellers, including females, appears to reflect the concurrence of two processes: the self-selection of people who routinely use violence in their broader social and economic interactions, and the neighborhood itself, in which violence is taught, practiced, and maintained as a way of negotiating the social realities of street and domestic life.

Interviews were conducted with 156 women drug sellers from two New York City neighborhoods with high concentrations of drug selling, neighborhoods that had active heroin markets in the 1970s and were sites for the growth of cocaine and crack markets a decade later. Structural equations models were estimated to test the relationships over two time periods between drug use and income generation activities including drug dealing, crime, legal work, and public transfers. Dependent variables included self-reports of income and expenses together with criminal career parameters. Results showed that the effects of prior drug expenses on subsequent crime, drug, and work incomes were nonsignificant. Overall, drug dealing appears to suppress future non-drug crime activity. Prior drug selling has a facilitating effect on later drug use and significant negative effects on subsequent crime income generation and legal work. Selling also helped women avoid the types of street hustling, including prostitution, and other crimes that characterized women's income strategies in earlier drug eras. Drug use careers are influenced less by earlier drug use patterns than by income growth from dealing that appears to increase opportunities to expand drug use.

Ten years after the U.S. Attorney General's Task Force on Violent Crime considered problems of violence in the United States, and on the heels of a National Academy Sciences report on violence, the nation seems poised to begin a new "war on violence." Past "wars" on crime problems, including the recently stalemated "war on drugs" have focused primarily on males. This one promises to be no different. Violence continues to be viewed as the province of young males in urban areas. According to the Uniform Crime Reports, over 75% of homicide victims in 1990 were males, and over 85% of homicide and aggravated assault arrestees were males. The risks of violent victimization are highest in urban areas where there also are the highest concentrations of poverty, residential mobility, single males, young persons, unemployment, racial heterogeneity and segregation, racial minorities, and other social correlates of violence.' And the higher rates of violent victimization among violent offenders suggests that these factors are similarly concentrated in urban areas for violent behaviors. Our research has led us to the conclusion that women in New York City are becoming more and more likely to involve themselves in violent street crime. This essay analyzes the developing role of women in violent street crime and poses a model, based on both historical analysis and empirical research, to explain the participation of women in violent street crime in the 1980s. Unlike the outcry over street crime committed by males, concerns about women and violence have centered primarily on their roles as victims of sexual and physical violence committed by strangers and by males in intimate relationships. When women do commit violent crimes, though, their behaviors are considered doubly deviant. Because violent behavior is concentrated among males, it is confounded with gender roles. Accordingly, women who commit violent acts are violating their sex roles as well as the criminal law. As a result, it seems that assaults and homicides by women still are considered a sideshow, rare acts that are expressive acts of revenge or self-protection in contrast to the predatory or instrumental acts of violence committed by males. Rarely is violence by women considered in the development or testing of theories of aggression.

Female drug addicts are often stereotyped either as promiscuous, lazy, and selfish, or as weak, scared, and trapped into addiction. These depictions typify the "pathology and powerlessness" narrative that has historically characterized popular and academic conversations about female substance abusers. Neither Villain Nor Victim attempts to correct these polarizing perspectives by presenting a critical feminist analysis of the drug world. By shifting the discussion to one centered on women's agency and empowerment, this book reveals the complex experiences and social relationships of women addicts. Essays explore a range of topics, including the many ways that women negotiate the illicit drug world, how former drug addicts manage the more intimate aspects of their lives as they try to achieve abstinence, how women tend to use intervention resources more positively than their male counterparts, and how society can improve its response to female substance abusers by moving away from social controls (such as the criminalization of prostitution) and rehabilitative programs that have been shown to fail women in the long term. Advancing important new perspectives about the position of women in the drug world, this book is essential reading in courses on women and crime, feminist theory, and criminal justice