SOCI 1002H Lecture 9: SOCI 1002 Lecture 9
14 Jun 2018
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Professor
Lecture 9
Women in Prison: Who and why?
• Did not consider gender as a pathway to crime until 1980s
• Gender ratio problem: why 80:20?
• What are analytic or explanatory differences between men and women’s
criminalization?
• Chivalry Thesis
• Women’s Liberation Thesis
• Pay equity, divorce laws, birth control
• Women have become more like men and seek power, may lead to
increase in crime among women
• Power Control Theory
• Girls who came into contact with the law come from low income families
Pathway to crime:
• Victimization as pathway to crime
• Research findings: 65-80% victimization
• Correlation?
• What is the connection?
• Risks of pathway analysis?
• Women’s own violence?
• Women in prison: Single parenting, limited education, chronic unemployment,
sexual abuse
• Welfare dependency, depression/anxiety, substance abuse, domestic
violence
• Criminal choices, prostitution, fraud, drug muling, assault, child
neglect
Creating Choices:
• Structural conditions of poverty and violence against women leads to:
• Low self esteem (believes she has little power to make change in her life)
• Conditions to be chosen (work, motherhood, abstinence, better relationship
choices)
• Idea of prison as campus (you go to prison like you go to university to become better)
Pathways Debate:
• Trauma as trajectory towards offending
• Coping, resisting, surviving
• Prison reforms: therapeutic not punitive (why can’t they get help before prison)
• Carceral feminism: incarceration, easier for people to be criminalized
• Victimization overshadows racialized rates of poverty
• Sovereignty vs. sexual violence
• Women’s own capacity for violence untheorized
Ashley Smith: died in prison, had learning disorders, in solitary confinement
Need as Risk: Unmanageable Prisoner
• High risk/high need
• Threat to the good order of the institution
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