Crime & Delinquency

Until recently the female offender was generally overlooked by an overwhelmingly male-dominated criminal justice system. Information derived from an extensive search of the literature illustrates the dramatic increase of female crime; it further suggests the potential for modifying the sexist nature of the criminal justice system. Questions are raised about some popular misconceptions pertaining to the data. A review of the history of women's involvement as subjects of the criminal justice system in general, and correction in particular, reveals disparate treatment for men and women throughout that process. Both positive and negative effects of this orientation are examined.

The article then focuses on rehabilitation. Attention is directed to particular suggestions for reform, leading to a postulation of new directions in treatment of the female offender.

Until recently the female offender was generally overlooked by an overwhelmingly male-dominated criminal justice system. Information derived from an extensive search of the literature illustrates the dramatic increase of female crime; it further suggests the potential for modifying the sexist nature of the criminal justice system. Questions are raised about some popular misconceptions pertaining to the data. A review of the history of women's involvement as subjects of the criminal justice system in general, and correction in particular, reveals disparate treatment for men and women throughout that process. Both positive and negative effects of this orientation are examined.

The article then focuses on rehabilitation. Attention is directed to particular suggestions for reform, leading to a postulation of new directions in treatment of the female offender.

The sex of the offender is a significant determinant of the length and type of the sentence imposed. Many sentencing statutes and judges make sex distinctions that are transmitted into different sentences for male and female offenders found guilty of the same offense. Sometimes this discrimination on the basis of sex works in favor of females before the law; most of the time it works against them; all of the time, whether the sentence is more lenient or more severe than the one imposed on a. male, the misbegotten motive is chivalry or special protectiveness. Our statutes and sentencing practices incorporate a double standard of morality. Males and females are not equal under the law.

Criticism of the juvenile court's jurisdiction over the status offender consistently neglects one important aspect of the issue. As a product of the court's history of extralegal paternalism, status offenses have involved the system in the maintenance of traditional family norms, which require greater obedience and chastity from females than from males.

The enforcement of status offenses has created a de facto double standard of juvenile justice in America. Like "good parents," police and court personnel tend to select for punishment girls whose behavior threatens parental authority and boys whose behavior is beyond that which can be excused as "boys will be boys." This pattern explains both the overrepresentation of girls charged with status offenses in court popula tions and the relatively harsh official response to this behavior. Evidence is presented to show that, at every level in the system, girls charged with status offenses are treated more harshly than girls charged with crimes. Further, the noncriminal activity of girls is frequently seen as requiring more drastic intervention than the criminal behavior of boys.

A ten-year comparison of New York State Family Court records examines the differences in the way courts adjudicate adolescent delin quents according to sex and offense. A brief historical analysis of female offender statutes is included to provide background for speculative discussion of court biases regarding the noncriminal category of sexual misconduct. Attention is called to the improbability of altering adolescent behavior in any positive way through the punitive and highly moralistic means now employed.

Forcible rape is unique among crimes in the manner in which its victims are dealt with by the criminal justice system. Raped women are subjected to an institutionalized sexism that begins with their treatment by the police, continues through a male-dominated criminal justice system influenced by pseudo-scientific notions of victim precipitation, and ends with the systematic acquittal of many de facto guilty rapists. The codification of sexism centers in the legal elements involved in proving guilt and obtaining convictions. In effect, the law's focus upon corrob oration, consent, and character has established a standard of proof in rape cases that is more stringent than "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Nonetheless, the processing of rape victims by the criminal justice system is gradually becoming more sensitive, facilitative, and reflective of the trauma experienced by the women involved. The legal position toward the crime is also becoming less sexist and more responsive to the realities involved in sexual assault. Both of these changes have come about through the efforts of the women's liberation movement. The most promising means for achieving more humane and dignified treatment of rape victims in the arms of the law have been "rape crisis centers." This approach to eliminating institutionalized sexism surrounding forcible rape has been significantly aided and abetted by successful attempts to modify the basic definition of the crime and to revise the legal elements needed for conviction.

This paper presents a re-evaluation of the author's position on the issue of a prison construction moratorium. It discusses the explosion of prison populations in recent years, the inevitable deterioration of facilities resulting from severe overcrowding of outmoded facilities, and the emergence of a new "hard line" in correctional philosophy espoused by many writers today.

A systematic re-thinking of the construction issue involved the collection and analysis of much data, all of the sort available to most correctional decision-makers. Analysis of the data revealed a number of surprising facts concerning the use of incarceration as a vehicle for controlling crime.

If correctional evaluation research is to contribute to the accumulation of practical knowledge, it should be designed to test abstract behavioral science principles that explain why a particular type of program should change the future conduct of a specific category of clientele. Focus on such theory leads to nontraditional types of sampling, designed to apply principles to only those cases for which they are relevant rather than to whatever mix one happens to encounter at a particular setting at one moment in its history.

In addition, organizational theory must be applied and tested to see whether—in the social, psychological, and political context where a program is studied—the clients have the experience that the behavioral science theory assumes the program is giving them.

Many of the specific recommendations of the Corrections Task Force of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals have impacts that cut across traditional administrative or program designations. Two broad sets of such standards are examined here: parole programs and procedures, and proposals for changes in institutional work experiences. In both cases the Task Force standards might be expensive to implement by themselves, but individual proposals generate a cost saving in other activities that partially or even completely offsets the budgetary impact of the standard.

The Task Force's recommendations on parole procedures include intensive supervision, financial support and job placement for parolees, and expansion of parolee rights in grant and revocation hearings. Standards in each of these matters could add as much as $700 per case to current parole costs. But all of the recommendations are designed to increase the likelihood of parolee success and thus to reduce institutional populations. The average cost per inmate in major institutions is approximately $5,000. Some of the Task Force standards can be expected to reduce institutional populations by more than enough to offset the additional costs of parole, while in other cases the Task Force proposals would probably impose net-but small-budgetary costs on correctional systems.

The Corrections report's proposals for changes in prison work experiences and pay imply basic restructuring of institutional work programs. Upgrading prison industries would impose enormous costs on either correctional systems or private employers who might be invited to operate establishments in prisons. In return, either correctional systems or private employers would generate enormous increases in output and sales, which would more than repay the costs of new capital equipment and higher inmate wages as long as the goods could be sold in markets that historically have been closed by law and custom. The Corrections standard for prevailing wages for maintenance workers, in contrast, would generate cost offsets only if some maintenance workers could be reassigned to profitable prison industries. On balance, the net cost of implementing all the standards dealing with institutional work and pay is likely to be very close to zero.

The legal concept of juvenile delinquency as administered for the last 150 years began to die with the Gault decision. Subsequent efforts to reformulate it have only provided evidence of our inability to restore vitality to a diseased organ. Delinquency jurisdiction should be removed from the juvenile court and be allowed to revert to the criminal courts, where many interests which are highly valued in our society can be protected more fully.

Parole, an extension of discretion to mitigate sentences for "rehabili tated" offenders, has had some negative consequences. The preponderance of empirical study also shows that parole supervision is not critical in determining community success, is not cost-effective, does not protect the public, and does not provide for the equal administration of justice. The difficulties lie not with personnel but with the criminal justice system.

Rehabilitation, therefore, is not an appropriate basis of a sentence structure or institutional operation. A flat sentence, with unconditional discharge at its expiration, would invite the prisoner to participate in rehabilitative programs if he was genuinely interested in them, not because he wanted to impress the parole board.