Women as Professionals in the Criminal Legal System
The final major area covered in this book, Section IV, is women’s employment in the CLS. The three major types of employment opportunities in this system are work in prisons and jails, policing/law enforcement, and the courts (i.e., lawyers and judges). Section IV of this book examines historical and current issues for women employed as correctional officers (guards), police, and lawyers and judges. In all of these professions, women have faced considerable resistance to entering these jobs and receiving promotions. Women’s disadvantage in the workplace is a “more enduring feminist concern,” and this is disproportionately so in CLS professions given the sexist “assumptions about gender norms for women” (Rabe-Hemp & Miller, 2018, p. 231). This resistance was and is based primarily on the attitude that women are unsuitable for these jobs because working with male offenders requires “manly”/hyper-masculine men. “Before the 1970s, almost all criminal justice employees in the world were men” (Rabe-Hemp & Miller, 2018, p. 231). Title VII, a 1972 amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, proved crucial for women’s professional entrance into jobs in the criminal legal system. Unfortunately, women’s advancement in both numbers and rank has been slow. Despite current efforts by law schools and police departments to hire more women, the numbers of women in these occupations are still quite low, as are the number of women working in men’s penal institutions (the majority of incarceration facilities) and women becoming partners in private law firms. As reported later in this book, even today some women working in these fields (policing, prisons/jails, legal firms, and courts) still face some minor and major resistance, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, obstacles, and hostility from some male administrators, coworkers, and the public (Helfgott, Gunnison, Murtagh, & Navejar, 2018).
Blurring of Boundaries of Women’s Experiences in Crime
In addition to acknowledging the invisibility of women offenders, women victims, and women working in the criminal legal system, it is important to recognize the overlapping of these categories in many women’s experiences. Given the extraordinarily high rates of gender-based abuse (see Chapters 7 through 9), it would be difficult to have women working in the criminal legal system who had not been victimized by GBA. Similarly, the offending chapters (Chapters 2 through 6), including some criminology theories (e.g., pathways and cycle of violence theories) address the well-documented relationship between gender-based abuse and other victimizations and offending behaviors. Many of these accounts suggest that the likelihood that prior victimization (especially gender-based abuse victimization) and offending (especially sex work/prostitution, running away, and drug offenses) are significantly related. For example, women and girls escaping abusive homes often have few legal avenues and engage in crimes such as sex work, selling drugs, and property crimes, in order to survive.
As discussed earlier, women victims, offenders, and professionals in the CLS have historically remained invisible. Because of the shame associated with sexual abuse and abuse by a partner, these crimes are not routinely reported to the criminal legal system, research interviewers, or even family members and health care officials. Similarly, offending women have remained invisible because, until recently, they made up less than 5% of the prison population. Although no actual count exists, U.S. prisons have housed, and continue to house, countless women who killed their very abusive mates as a last resort (e.g., Browne, 1987; Richie, 1996). Finally, roles for women professionals in the criminal legal system were largely nonexistent until the 1970s. The goal of this book is to make issues surrounding women and crime more visible, to trace the changes in society and the criminal legal system that have occurred, and to propose changes that still need to occur. But first, to understand these issues, it is important to have an understanding of feminism and the difference between sex and gender.
Sex Versus Gender
Differences between men/boys and women/girls have been divided into two categories: sex differences and gender differences. Sex differences are biological differences, including differences in reproductive organs, body size, muscle development, and hormones. Even biologically it is not always clear what sex someone is; 1 in 2,000 births are intersex individuals, and the pattern has been to have the doctor decide the sex at birth in these “questionable” cases (Kessler, 1990). Gender differences are those that are ascribed by society and that relate to expected social roles. Examples of gender differences include clothing, wages, child-care responsibilities, and professions. Not only are most differences between males and females gender (as compared to sex) differences, but gender-based differences are rooted largely in inequality (MacKinnon, 1990). Because society creates these inequalities, society must also be the solution to restructuring the images and opportunities of women and men (and girls and boys) to achieve equality.
Sex and gender differences are further complicated by the recognition that sex is not a female–male binary and that people are born with unclear biological sex markers, including “ambiguous” genitalia (not clearly distinguishable whether the body part is a penis or a clitoris) and ranges of hormones and chromosomes (Sanz, 2017). Sanz (2017) points to Global North scientists’ devotion to a sex binary since the 18th century and their commitment to disavowing the extensive biological distributions among the “sex” continuum. The acceptance of sex as nonbinary makes the social construction of gender as peculiar as it should be considered. Forbes’s (2014) definition of trans (an abbreviation of the word transgender) is simply people who “live as the gender that is not associated with their birth sex” (p. 388). Thus, a proposed way of moving feminist criminology forward is to trans framework, that is, to move beyond a gender binary (male–female binary), to help address the multitude of ways that gender privileges and oppresses (Musto, 2019, p. 50).
Court cases on sex discrimination have historically confused sex and gender differences, often ruling to the disadvantage of women on the basis that cultural/societal (or gender) differences are “immutable” (Rhode, 1989, p. 3). That is, legal discourse has historically failed to distinguish sex differences from gender differences, viewing both as inherent and not recognizing the role society plays in perpetuating gender inequalities. Inherent in this distinction between sex and gender are the concepts of sexism and patriarchy. Sexism refers to oppressive attitudes and behaviors directed at any gender; that is, sexism is discrimination or prejudice based on gender. In practice, the discrimination, prejudice, and negative attitudes and behaviors based on sex and gender are directed primarily at women (e.g., women are not as “good” as men, women exist for the sexual pleasure of men, women are defined by their beauty, etc.). Sexism can be further divided as it is in Chapter 6, distinguishing between benign and benevolent sexism, and include structural sexism, described in Chapter 7. Homan (2019) defines structural sexism as “systematic gender inequality in power and resources” and distinguishes between its enactment at the state (macro), marital dyad (meso), and individual (micro) levels (p. 487). Although Homan applies structural sexism to health inequality, it applies also to the criminal legal system and justice inequality. Marital status as a gendered/sexist phenomenon is raised frequently in this book, as is macro structural inequality in terms of how laws, policies, police, courts, prisons/jails/youth detention institutions perpetuate gender inequality for women/girls as victims, offenders, and workers in the criminal legal system. Homan stresses that structural sexism must be studied “across a variety of status characteristics, including race, education, marital status, sexual orientation, and parental status” (p. 509).
Patriarchy,