Criminal Justice Broken Essay

Feminist criminology has been around since the late 1960's and started out centered on speculations brought upon traditional theories of crime. Most traditional theories didn't necessarily ignore women in the criminal justice system yet they generalized crime and what causes a person to turn to crime so that women who commit crimes are overlooked by the generalization. Not only are the numbers skewed when you look at gender in criminal justice offenders but there is also a certain bias in the criminal justice systems workers. In the movie Vera Drake there is a clear example of this when the investigator and the officer come into the movie. While watching you can easily assume that the female officer is treated and thought of much differently

Patricia O 'Brien 's article on We should stop putting women in jail. For anything is not practical. The article title was misleading and the article focused on women should not be incarcerated for nonviolent crimes and getting rid of women 's prisons. The examination of women in U.S. prisons reveals that majority are nonviolent offenders with poor education, little employment experiences and abuse from childhood to adulthood. She said the United States is a prison nation and have more than 1.5 million people incarcerated.

The claim that "[women] remain marginal to the study and practise of imprisonment" reflects historical disregard for the needs and experiences of women in the criminal justice system. For a long time, men's perspectives have dominated study and policy on incarceration, with women's experiences being mostly disregarded or underestimated. The disregard of women's particular situations and needs, as well as the lack of consideration given to them while developing laws and practises, has had a significant impact on the incarceration of women. For instance, studies have revealed that women in prison frequently have different needs and experiences than males, and that many of them have endured serious trauma and violence. But neither policies nor

Ella Dotzler WGS 1225 Final Paper May 1, 2023 The Harvard University Rejection of Anti-Carceral Feminism Ideals Introduction & Carceral vs. Anti-Carceral Feminism Modern feminists who align themselves with the prison abolitionist viewpoints, myself included, are facing an internal moral dilemma: How do we, as both feminists and abolitionists, advocate for punishment of gender-based violent crimes while still maintaining an abolitionist identity? The urge to hold people accountable for gender-based institutional and sexual violence makes it difficult to separate feminist accountability ideals from the imaginative—and not yet established—ideals of prison and police abolition. This tension is particularly acute in cases where survivors of gender-based

Women of color are the most targeted, prosecuted, and imprisoned women in the country and rapidly increasing their population within the prison systems. According to Nicholas Freudenberg, 11 out of every 1000 women will end up incarcerated in their lifetime, the average age being 35, while only five of them are white, 15 are Latinas, and 36 are black. These two groups alone make up 70 percent of women in prison, an astonishing rate compared to the low percentage comprise of within the entire female population in the country (1895). Most of their offenses are non-violent, but drug related, and often these women come from oppressive and violent backgrounds, where many of their struggles occurred directly within the home and from their own family.

It argues that the criminal justice system is inherently patriarchal and focuses on the causes of patriarchal oppression such as sexist behaviour and the deliberate exclusion of female voices as well as the ways that gender race and sexuality create different experiences for women in the criminal justice system. Marxist and Liberal theories see women as individuals, whereas Radical feminism view women as a collective that are still oppressed by the patriarchy. Radical feminism expresses that the female experience within the criminal justice system cannot be addressed and understood without a deeper understanding of the socio-political context that they occur

Angela Davis demonstrates the ongoing violent abuse as she quotes a report on sexual maltreatment in women’s prisons, “We found that male correctional employees have vaginally, anally, and orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them” (Davis 78). However disturbing this blunt sexual contact that male officers take with the vulnerable prisoners may be, the officers adopt even more severe tactics to harass and abuse the women as they often utilize “mandatory pat-frisks or room searches to grope women 's breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas...” (Davis 79). To add insult to injury, women are virtually incapable of escaping from their abuser(s). Prison employees upkeep their inappropriate behavior as it is believed they will “rarely be held accountable, administratively or criminally” (Davis 78).

Consequently, there is evidence from studies that draw conclusions that there is gender bias in sentencing for both women and men. On the surface there appears to be a degree of preferential treatment or leniency in the criminal justice system. However, there are other factors that enshroud the whole aspect of biases that include class, race and the offence in question among others. There is need for the justice system to understand female offenders in order to be able to address it effectively and avoid the perpetual claims of bias which only signifies the

Based on a 1986 interview by Lynn E. Zimmer of the University of Chicago Press including seventy female officers, approximately one hundred male officers and thirty-seven inmates. Additionally, administrators of the correctional facilities and prisons were also included in this interview and included facilities in New York and Rhode Island and identified these issues. The interview found that in their official role, females followed rules, could perform as well as their male counterparts but lacked flexibility than that of the male co-workers to make decisions quickly. When it came to the revised role in the interview, it was identified that women evaded contact with inmates, or dangerous situations that could occur on the job. Females officers considered this a hindrance and relied on their male counter parts for safety and or backup.

In the criminal justice system, the corrections component is also responsible for the rehabilitation of the convicted individual. It is their duty to attempt to make the defendant a productive member of society once again. Based on the individual’s behavior while incarcerated, the court and corrections officials may decide to place them on parole, which ensures that the individual will comply with the rules of society once they are fully released from the system. The criminal justice system is an essential role in the organizational structure of not only the United States but also in countries around the world. If there were no criminal justice system to administer punishment, the world would be unstructured, disorganized, unjustified, cruel, and not to mention a chaotic place for it citizens.

As argued above, criminology has examined the possibility that the criminal system extends the ethic of “chivalry” towards women, thus treating them more leniently than men. As Agnes McHugh (1916) proclaimed: “A man jury will not convict a woman murderer in this county, if the prosecutor is a man. I think this leniency may be traced to the chivalry latent in every man. The jurors see two or three big strong men sitting at the prosecutors’ table, and subconsciously feel that these fierce prosecutors are attacking the frail, pretty woman in the prisoner’s chair.

The discipline associated with the modern prison is not contained within prison walls, but originates from the society outside the walls. The mechanisms of control, examination and classification operate within all the institutions and power, in its various forms, flows through all of them. These other institutions resemble prisons as they fulfill similar functions in society. I write this reflection from my position as a white, middle-class, female leader in the public K-12 education system. While I have regularly experienced oppression, judgement, and been marginalized and dismissed because I am female, I am aware that I have not had to endure what women of color have had to endure.

Police officers may perceive men as more dangerous and write reports that reflect that sentiment while giving more favorable arrest reports for women. In cases of joint effort between male and female offenders, women may be considered followers rather than intentional perpetrators (Starr 12-14). In addition, judges may consider the dependency females in the aforementioned cases have on male perpetrators (Hofer 128-129). In general, women are perceived to be more cooperative during the legal process and thus may earn some degree of leniency by the prosecutor or judge, though there is little definite evidence to suggest such a correlation (Starr 15).

J. 2014) who claims that: “While women have demanded equal opportunity in the fields of legitimate endeavours, a similar number of determined women have forced their way into the world of major crime, such as white collar crime, murder and robbery”. This illustrates that female offenders are introducing a newly evolving breed of women. Brown (Bholse S. 2009) furthers this point by claiming that these new evolved women have begun to “engage in predatory crimes of violence and corporate fraud. Making them enter a more male dominated world”.

According to feminist criminology, the fact the women are not always treated equally to men is the reason women commit crimes and are criminals. It has been a long journey for women and their equal rights and opportunities. In 1920, women were finally granted the opportunity