The friends and family that I have not already listed that I thank are (mostly alphabetically) Joan Antunes, Ronette Bachman, Claudia Bayliff, Jon Belknap, Bonnie Berry, Susan Buckingham, Lynette Carpenter, Terry Dangler, Emmanuel David, Anne DePrince, Jenn Doe, Patrick Greaney, Jana Kappelar, Shoni and Gary Kahn, Dora-Lee Larson, Vera Lopez, Nikhil Mankekar, Gail McGarry, Janie McKenzie, Polly McLean, Merry Morash, Onye Ozuzu, Jane and Fred Pampel, Joe Prizio, Sheetal Ranjan, Jan Roman, Cynthia Russell, Bernadette Stewart, Cris Sullivan, Jason Williams, Patti Witte, Edie Zagona, and “Upper Case,” Sue, Jamie, and Erin Summers. Regarding undergraduate and graduate students, I’ve been a professor since 1986 and taught so many who have significantly changed my life for the better. I hope you know who you are because I’m worried to make a list and forget someone. Thank you to the “older” ones for staying in touch with me all these decades, and to the newer ones who at least act like you think I’m funny and a good mentor. As I’ve said to my students the past few years: “No pressure, but my generation has made a mess of things, especially the criminal legal system, and you all have to fix it.”
And Jessica Miller, I am so immensely grateful to you! Thank you for contacting me to switch this edition of The Invisible Woman to SAGE! This edition is by far the best and I’m grateful for your confidence in me, as well as your patience and guidance. I am also so appreciative of the careful copyediting and advice from Colleen Brennan and Rebecca Y. Lee after the manuscript left my hands.
I submitted this manuscript right as the COVID-19 pandemic was causing lockdowns in the United States. Many of us are at home and working remotely, but there are so many people who can’t work from home, have lost their jobs, already didn’t have adequate health care, are incarcerated, are living with an abusive family member, and made more invisible and marginalized as a result of this pandemic. The impact of COVID-19 on the most marginalized, including prisoners, is being documented, although there is far less press about women’s prisons. In my final edits of this preface, I also want to acknowledge the profound successes the #BlackLivesMatter movement has had, and will likely continue to have, including changing police practices and tearing down racist statutes, following the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery and the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I wish I had time to tie this critical period of criminal legal system accountability into this edition of the book, but I don’t (and asked to add these few sentences at the very last hour). This is giving me hope about structural changes in policing that are beyond the expansion of community policing and adding more women, queer folks, and people of Color to law enforcement, but actually changing who responds to the mentally ill, more funding for education and less for law enforcement, and so on.
SAGE and the author would also like to thank the following reviewers for their input and for helping improve the fifth edition:
Benjamin D. Albers, Bridgewater College
Robbin Day Brooks, Arizona State University
J. Robert Duke, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Angelina Inesia-Forde, Walden University
Christina Mancini, Virginia Commonwealth University
Ariane Prohaska, University of Alabama
• New to This Edition •
This edition is heavily updated with research and data that have appeared since the last edition was published in 2014. Some of the chapter titles have changed because the foci have changed. Topics new to this edition include anti-carceral/abolitionist feminism, structural sexism, adultification, environmental criminology, the #MeToo movement, revenge porn, and trauma-informed care. Given that queer criminology has grown, there is more information on this, as well. Finally, the previous edition had 13 chapters. In this edition, what was formerly Chapter 4 “A Gendered Account of Women and Girls’ Offending” is now two chapters: Chapter 4 “Accounting for Gender–Crime Patterns” and Chapter 5 “The Context of Women and Girls’ Offending.” The world charts included at the end of the previous chapters have been updated. They would have used so much space in the book (driving the costs up), that SAGE acquisitions editor Jessica Miller and I decided to make these available for free to the teachers and students who adopt this book. Specific differences by chapter include:
Chapter 1, Gendering Criminology Through an Intersectional Lens, is updated and the title changed to reflect the broader focus on intersectionality, with new concepts including the Global South, the Global North, sex-positive criminology, carceral feminism, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), and structural sexism.
Chapter 2, Theories Part I: Positivist, Evolutionary, Strain, Differential Association, Social Control, and Women’s Emancipation Theories, also changed titles and, along with the next chapter on theories, is reorganized and provides more recent tests of the theories.
Chapter 3, Theories Part II: Critical, Labeling, Cycle of Violence, Life Course, Pathways, and Masculinity Theories, like Chapter 2, changed titles and is reorganized and provides more recent tests of the theories covered in this chapter. This chapter also includes three new figures. One is on critical race feminism; another compares cycle of violence, pathways, and life course theories; and the last is Gunnison’s (2015) test of life course theory.
Chapter 4, Accounting for Gender–Crime Patterns, has more recent data on U.S. arrest rates and patterns for many specific offenses over time. It introduces three steps to assessing, interpreting, and explaining gender-convergence patterns over time.
Chapter 5, The Context of Women and Girls’ Offending for Specific Crimes, provides far more information on how the commission of various crimes is gendered. It includes a new figure on girls’ strategies for meth procurement based on Lopez and colleagues’ (2019) work, introduces the concept of “bargaining with the patriarchy,” and presents research on nonmedical prescription drug use and child abductions/kidnappings.
Chapter 6, Processing Women and Girls in the Criminal Legal System, introduces new material on cultural variables, the complexity of chivalry, and the legacy of racism in confounding measures of crime. This chapter also addresses the necessity for statistical models to account for the intersections of gender with race, and the usefulness of separate statistical models for females and males to determine whether contributors to CLS outcome decisions are gendered.
Chapter 7, Incarcerating, Punishing, and “Treating” Offending Women and Girls, is reorganized and provides updated data on gender