Exploring Female Offending: A Feminist Perspective

The criminal justice system main focus has always been shifted towards male offenders and their responses to male crimes. Women and girls offending lacked attention simply because most crimes were known to be committed by males and not females. Nevertheless, towards the end of the 20th century, female incarceration tremendously took a turn for the worst, leading to more study on women/girls, women and crime offending, crimes, and the criminal justice system in regard to feminist. This increase rate of women incarceration was led in regard to “war on drugs”. It was explained that women’s and girl’s crime and deviance is trigger often by biological factors than by social or economic forces (Daly & Chesney-Lind, 1988). In the late 1960s, Bertrand

Life course theory in my opinion, displays a better explanation on women’s criminality and their reasoning behind their offenses. Drawing from the structure of social theory by Gottfredson and Hirschi’s, Laub’s formed this theory, which speculates life events in one’s life. Not only does life course theory look at the importance of what initiate these women criminal behaviors but it also explore existences patterns that may have caused a change. Following this theory, life course is an interview process that interviews incarcerated women at the adolescent stage and then interviewed again in their adulthood stage. Peggy, Giordano, Deines, and Cernkovich main focus in respect to women offending, is to get a better study of female to date. Starting from the beginning of childhood, on to adolescent years, and up to adulthood, there are two factors that focuses on individuals’ behavioral changes. These changes are both informal and formal social controls. Peers, family, work, school, and so on, are many examples of factors that contributes and bring changes to women delinquency as they go through their life