Gender, Ethnicity, and Offending over the Life Course: Women’s Pathways to Prison in the Aloha State

This paper develops what some researchers are now calling the ‘pathways’ approach to understanding women’s criminality. This perspective argues that women’s offending is an outgrowth of histories of violence, trauma, and addiction – conditioned by race, culture, gender inequality, and class. This paper expands the perspective on crime across the life course for females, providing a more nuanced analysis of the nature of intimate relationships and developmental turning points for women. Whereas men’s assumption of adult responsibilities such as marriage and childrearing may be turning points away from delinquency and crime, the matter is far more complex and may even be the inverse for some women. The paper also finds that women of Native Hawaiian ancestry have more negative experiences with education, employment, and poorer outcomes on parole compared to women without Hawaiian ancestry, thus contributing to the literature on the relationship between ethnicity, structure, and offending over the life course.