Gender and Crime: Offense Patterns and Criminal Court Sanctions

Abstract

The relation between gender and criminality is strong, and is likely to remain so. Women have traditionally been much less likely than men to commit violent crimes, and that pattern persists today. Rates of female involvement in some forms of property crime-notably petty theft and fraud-appear to be increasing. However, while the relative increase in women's property crime involvement is significant, female participation even in these crimes remains far less than that of men. The relation of gender to case processing decisions in the criminal justice system varies from stage to stage. Although the pertinent literature is plagued by methodological and interpretive problems, several tentative conclusions can be offered. Women are more likely than men, other things equal, to be released on recognizance; however, when bail is set, the amount of bail does not appear to be affected by the defendant's gender. There is no clear evidence that the defendant's gender systematically affects prosecution, plea negotiation, or conviction decisions. In sentencing, however, women appear to receive systematic leniency except when they are convicted of high-severity offenses.

Contributions of quantitative methods to the study of gender and crime, or bootstrapping our way into the theoretical thicket

“…Curran, 1983;Figueira-McDonough, 1985;Ghali and Chesney-Lind, 1986). Women also appear to be treated less severely than men in the pretrial release and final 15For a review of this research prior to 1980, see Nagel and Hagan (1982).…”

“…For example, Steffensmeier and his colleagues (1993) found that while most studies report that female defendants are treated more leniently than male defendants, especially in the decision to incarcerate, several methodological shortcomings appear in the extant research: (1) most of the studies are based on data sets that are 20 or 30 years old, (2) many of the studies used poorly designed measures to control for prior record and offense severity, (3) some authors failed to analyze the decision to incarcerate separately from length of imprisonment, and (4) little attention is given to contextual (e.g., workload, characteristics of the jurisdiction) and extralegal (e.g., race) variables that may moderate the effects of gender on sentence severity. After addressing these concerns with data from the Pennsylvania courts, Steffensmeier et al (1993, p. 435) found that gender has only a small effect on the imprisonment decision and it has no impact on the length of sentence decision (see Nagel and Hagan, 1982). Notably, these patterns hold irrespective of offense severity and race (cf., e.g., Bickle and Peterson, 1991 ;Daly, 1989a;Gruhl and Welch, 1984).…”

Analysis of Ecrime in Crowd-Sourced Labor Markets: Mechanical Turk vs. Freelancer

“…However, gender based differences in adoption preferences may shift the equilibrium towards mechanical turk or vice versa [56]. Women are also less likely to commit crime offline [39,15]. Thus, higher ratio of women may shift the equilibrium toward Mechanical Turk.…”

A Model for Predicting Outcomes of Sexual Harassment Complaints by Race and Gender

“…The Chivalry/Paternalism thesis (Nagel and Hagen 1983;Moulds 1980) suggests that men view themselves as the protectors of women and therefore are inclined to act in a way which shields them from harm. According to this perspective, men view women as being like children who are not accountable for their actions, are more tolerant of offenses committed by women, and tend to give more favorable decisions to women when compared to men for similar offenses.…”