Gendered Imprisonment in Japan: An Examination of Imprisonment for Stimulant Drug Offenses

Japan is well known not only as a society with low crime rates but also for using incarceration sparingly, sending few convicted offenders to prison. Yet, certain crimes, such as drug offenses, receive little leniency in the Japanese criminal justice system. Johnson (1996b) found empirical support for both chivalry and an ‘'evil woman'’ effect in the system's treatment of female drug offenders. This paper reexamines and extends the core issues in Johnson's (1996b) exploration of women's imprisonment in Japan. It traces the patterns in female incarceration where data are available from the postwar period until 2004. It specifically examines the incidences of incarceration of women for stimulant drug offenses and identifies key correlates on the macro‐level associated with changes in imprisonment practices.     

Parenting Programs in Women's Prisons

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a national survey of parenting programs in women's prisons. Parenting programs may be defined as those programs that specifically address the woman's role as mother and attempt to facilitate her performance of that role, and/or aid in the development of parental skills. These programs range from parenting classes of a few hours to nurseries where imprisoned women and their infants can live together during the term of imprisonment. The need for such programs is also discussed.     

Taking Abortion Rights Seriously: Whole Woman's Health v Hellerstedt

In Whole Woman's Health v Hellerstedt the Supreme Court of the United States passed down its most important decision on abortion for just under a decade. By a majority of 5‐3, the Court ruled that two provisions in a Texas law regulating abortion on grounds of women's health were constitutionally invalid, placing a ‘substantial obstacle’ in the way of women seeking to exercise their right to abortion. This comment delineates the key ways in which the Court's application of the standard of constitutional review under Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992) to the Texas provisions marks a landmark development for the protection of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v Wade, not the least by making clear that state abortion regulations which cite ‘women's health’ justifications should not pass constitutional review where those justifications lack a credible factual basis.     

Law,language, and the power of ‘invisible threats’ of violence against women

Violence, and the threat of violence, is a pervasive feature of women's lives. From high-profile threats in politics to everyday harms such as domestic abuse, violence, threat, and intimidation control women's behaviour and silence their voices. Yet in many cases the pernicious and harmful effect of threat is not captured by the law. Drawing on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and empirical research undertaken in Northern Ireland, this article analyses the ways in which both objective and ‘incorporated’ social structures generate invisible forces of fear and threat that the law does not see, but that women feel and structure their lives around. The article develops the novel conceptual tool of ‘invisible threats’ to capture threat as harm, to show the relation between threat and gendered (in)securities, and to challenge institutions of the law to respond better to invisible threats as perceived and articulated by women.     

Political biography and autobiography and the study of women in politics in Canada: The case of political ambition

This article examines the concept of women's political ambition by focusing on electoral politics in Canada. It begins with an overview of some of the key theories associated with political ambition among women and identifies several ways in which previous research indicates that patterns among women legislators may be different from those of their male counterparts. While recognising that there may be some limitations of auto/biographical works as reliable sources of information, the central idea of this article is that political auto/biography of Canadian women legislators may prove to be important resources in furthering our understanding of political ambition among women legislators. As part of this analysis, this research examines 16 auto/biographical works of women who have served in Canada's federal and provincial legislatures since the Second World War.     

Sex Matters

Abstract

Male and female inmates have different profiles and needs, and adapt to prison in different ways. When policy is made and implemented, however, the male model of imprisonment sets the standard. This article argues that courts and prison administrators should consider the differences between men and women in prison, particularly in the context of cross-gender searches, which brings those differences to the fore. The case of Jordan v. Gardner, in which the court recognized women inmates' specific histories of abuse in evaluating the potential psychological harm of cross-gender searches, is presented as an exemplary use of a gender-specific standard. It is recommended that a gender-specific standard be used by both courts and prison administrators in order to measure more appropriately and accurately the impact of cross-gender searches on women inmates.     

Family biography,fertility and memory-making in an AIDS-affected South African site

The critical challenges of AIDS and poverty in post-apartheid South Africa impact the ways in which memories are articulated and family and fertility histories ultimately constructed. This article considers three life histories written in the course of ethnographic work on women's childbearing conducted intermittently between 1998 and 2014, and typical of other histories in the same peri-urban locale. Personal accounts of a mother and her two daughters initially centre on domestic strife and adversity – and the family as a whole is represented as struggling and disunited. In the aftermath of the death of one of the daughters from AIDS in 2001, the memories and discourse are subtly reworked by the two women in ways that are meant to counteract stigma, reclaim dignity and defend the family. The paper focuses on reproductive dynamics and memory-making in a hardship-driven and AIDS-affected setting and on the ethnographer's endeavours in witnessing, interviewing and making sense of people's ‘intent’ and ‘the urge to forget, to go on living’.     

Prison sentences: last resort or the default sanction?

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the sentencing purposes for penal penalties, judges’ perceptions of sentencing purposes and prison sentences, and the effects of penal sanctions. We examine judges’ positions towards different penalties, with a focus on imprisonment, since their views on the different penalties are related to their sentencing decision-making. Understanding these views is then critical for several practical and political purposes, including bridging the gap between academic discourse and legal practice. We accessed judges’ views on penal sanctions through a questionnaire and an interview. Our sample is compounded by the judges of the criminal courts from the three major cities in Portugal. Despite the most recent criminological empirical knowledge, judges valued imprisonment as the most adequate sentence, both for different crimes and for different judicial purposes. This result is not consistent with viewing imprisonment as a ‘last resort’ solution. Indeed, we did not find this ‘last resort’ position in our data, and it is not apparent in the judicial statistics on imprisonment rates. Our data highlight the importance of increasing judges’ training on criminological and sociological issues as well as the importance of changing the influence of their personal beliefs regarding penal sanctions into research-based positions.     

Women's Accounts of Domestic Violence

Abstract

Critiques of behavioral inventories, qualitative studies of battered women's experiences, and communications research all suggest that women's accounts of violence contain information and a more complex structure than is captured by checklist measures that focus on types of abuse. We conducted a quantitative thematic analysis of 162 women's accounts of domestic violence to assess structure and content. Most women presented domestic violence as a “story” with an introduction, body and a conclusion: 59% presented a “complete story” and 33% a “near story.” Background information and problem statements were the most prevalent content statements in the “introduction,” and relationship issues and explanations were most common in the “conclusion.” Bivariate analyses revealed that accounts did not vary by socio-demographic factors and severity of the incident. Men were less likely to present complete stories, had far briefer narratives, and never discussed relationship issues. Knowledge of the structure and content of women's accounts provides greater understanding of women's responses to violence.     

Gender,Indigeneity, and the Criminal Courts: A Narrative Exploration of Women's Sentencing in Western Australia

Ethel Rosenberg's prison letters illustrate women's prison writing at a transitional point. Preceding her work are prison writings that focus on self-justification and autobiography; afterward come texts that assert the writer's pride and challenge the penal system and society. Rosenberg's correspondence includes elements of both traditional and contemporary women's prison literature. Along traditional lines, her letters focus on family matters and her own mental state as she attempts to adapt to imprisonment. In their outright assertions of pride in self and anger at perceived injustice, Rosenberg's letters point ahead to the writing of women inmates today.     

Managing a large household. The gender division of work in orphanages in Dutch towns in the early modern period, 1580–1800

Early modern social institutions were modelled analogous to the family, and work within these institutions strongly depended upon the co-operation of women and men. This type of organization seems to be contradictory to processes of professionalization and bureaucratization. This article investigates to what extent professionalization and bureaucratization took place in early modern orphanages and how this influenced the gender division of work. By analyzing various occupations, remuneration and access to work in three Dutch orphanages it becomes clear that the frequently mentioned characteristics that made ‘typical’ women's work combinable with women's reproductive tasks, were not all applicable and cannot wholly explain female access to these occupations. Work was characterized by an increasing differentiation, hierarchy and, to a certain extent, bureaucratization tendencies. At the same time, the gender division sharpened. However, the late eighteenth century ideology of women as nurturers and the strong analogy to the role women were supposed to play within the household prevented exclusion from this domain.     

Women's Defences

ABSTRACT

This paper examines theoretical and practical problems surrounding the use of women's defences such as Battered Woman's Syndrome, Premenstrual Syndrome and Postpartum Depression. A framework for deconstructing women's defences which exposes power relationships preserved by legal discourse is offered. The central argument presented is that a contextual examination which links practice to theory reveals that women's defences are not necessarily harmful to women, but that specific feminist strategies must be developed to ensure that such defences do not replicate existing power-knowledge dynamics within legal discourse.     

Malign Neglect or Benign Respect

Abstract

A central tenet of feminist criminological scholarship is the examination of women's experiences with crime and incarceration through their own narratives. Through semi-structured interviews with thirty jailed women, this article examines carceral conditions through the critical lens of the female inmate. Highlighted in this article is the availability and quality of health care in a detention center in Arizona. The findings indicate a contentious duality, exposing both heinous neglect and benign solicitude in the care delivered to jailed women. This duality is situated within the dismal health care system available to indigent women in the region.     

Women,the Home and Resistance in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This paper provides a perspective on women's resistance in Northern Ireland by focussing on their experiences of house raids. In light of a growing literature on women in conflict with the state, it argues that women have become increasingly politicised and organised in their resistance to repeated incursions into the home by the security forces which have ruptured traditional boundaries around relations of motherhood, home maker and sexual privacy. Based on a qualitative study of one hundred women in Northern Ireland, this paper suggests the coercive agents of the state have played a significant role in both the individual and collective resistance of women. Paradoxically, it seems, the security forces have become agents of change whereby the exposition and violation of the home has been one of the forces which has nurtured and defined women's political consciousness.     

Criminal victimization and low self-control: An extension and test of a general theory of crime

Using data on victimization from a national sample of college students, we replicated, refined, and extended Ferraro's models to test the “shadow of sexual assault” thesis and to explore factors that heightened women's age-specific fear of rape. We took into account temporal dimensions of crime-specific fear (during the day and at night) and used a domain-specific model. Overall, fear of rape among college women “shadowed” their fear of other personal crimes. Our age-specific results concerning college women's fear of rape largely mirrored Ferraro's results for women more generally. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Lost in registration? Missing occupations of single women in the Bruges countryside,c.1814

The absence of occupational titles for women in historical censuses has stymied numerous scholars. Various authors have explained this phenomenon as carelessness or bias on the part of the census-takers. Women's work was of little interest to the authorities and census officials focused their efforts upon the activities of the head of household. While source triangulation can be a useful tool for uncovering ‘hidden’ employment of women, it is often a complex and time-consuming process. In this article we outline an alternative to deal with the issue of missing occupations of single women in censuses by exploring their living arrangements. We identify four aspects of co-residence that can highlight the roles played within the household by single women without registered employment: their relation to the head of the household, and that individual's occupation, property and marital status. Comparing data from the 1814 population census regarding two social agro-systems and the city of Bruges, we argue that occupational titles of single women were not randomly omitted by the census officials, but reflect the embeddedness of these women in the family economy and household. While we do not refute recent research that stresses single women's economic independence during the long eighteenth century, our findings suggest that for a subset of singles this was not the case. We claim that by studying registered labour only, the historical picture of single women's work is biased or at the very least incomplete.     

An Application of Convergence Theory to Women's Drinking and Driving

Abstract

Convergence theory hypothesizes that as the social roles of the sexes equalize, there will be less differentiation in the social behavior of men and women. Fatal Accident Reporting Systems (FARS) data from 1982 through 1991 were utilized to investigate the convergence hypothesis regarding drinking and driving as a possible explanation for women's increased single vehicle crash deaths. Only driver fatalities were studied: N = 125,504 (17.6% female) with a subset, N = 42,129 (15.3% female) selected by quality of blood alcohol concentration (BAC) reporting for examining alcohol use. Drinking and driving for both sexes has decreased over the ten-year period. Convergence in drinking and driving behavior is not a viable explanation of women's increased traffic deaths. Women now are as likely as men to have a driver's license and women have also increased their annual mileage. Increased exposure to traffic death may provide a better explanation of women's increasing fatalities.     

Women's Emancipation and the Ownership of Firearms

ABSTRACT

Criminologists argue that the involvement of women in traditionally male forms of criminality has increased as a result of their increased economic and social liberation from patriarchal control. Although this argument remains controversial, it has been suggested that emancipated attitudes and behaviors can also be linked to women's gun ownership. Using data from the General Social Survey, we test an emancipation model of women's firearm ownership. Our analysis reveals that emancipation is related to the ownership of such weapons among married but not among unmarried women. Further analysis suggests that this finding reflects the power of culture to shape the action strategies through which attitudes are put into action.