Feminist Criminology

Family has long been central to our understandings of offending and desistance. However, in research on adult offenders or prisoners, the focus is more often on romantic partners, children, and peers than on families of origin. This article underscores the continuing importance of families of origin in the reentry and desistance processes of urban female African American former prisoners and probationers. The author demonstrates that these relationships play an important part in women’s identities, even when they often come into direct conflict with desistance efforts. Thus, these women must learn to balance sometimes-contradictory messages of their obligations within their family and their emerging identities as desisting former offenders.

The criminal justice system (CJS) frequently encounters victims of intimate partner violence (IPV). Despite these frequent encounters, professionals in the CJS often fail to adequately address victims’ needs. The experiences of female IPV victims (N = 29) who approached the CJS in Southeast Queensland, Australia for support and protection are examined throughout this article. Findings from the in-depth interviews reveal that women often face stereotypical and victim-blaming attitudes despite an existing policy environment that promotes victim protection and offender accountability. Implications for policy and practice are discussed

This article examines constructs of a theoretical model that explains the social learning process responsible for individuals’ fear of crime levels and how this socialization process differs for men and women. Specifically, the authors apply the original principles of Akers’s social learning theory (i.e., differential association, definitions, differential reinforcement, and imitation) to the gendered fear of crime socialization process. The authors argue that fear of crime socialization and gender socialization become a fused concept called “gendered fear of crime socialization” that leads individuals to establish associations, definitions, reinforcement, and imitation of gendered fear of crime.

Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork with a community of criminalized women in eastern Massachusetts, this article explores their ambivalent, often negative, relationship with and feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous (AA/NA). We suggest that coerced participation in AA/NA undermines any potential value that these programs may have for other types of participants and that the Twelve Step ideology of personal responsibility and turning oneself over to a Higher Power fails to resonate for women who are homeless, poor, incarcerated, abused, and have had their children taken from them.