The Female Offender
Girls, Women, and Crime
- Meda Chesney-Lind - University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA
- Lisa Pasko - University of Denver, USA
In an engaging style, authors Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko explore gender and cultural factors in women's lives that often precede criminal behaviour and address the question of whether female offenders are more violent today than in the past. The authors provide a revealing look at how public discomfort with the idea of women as criminals significantly impacts the treatment received by this offender population.
The focus on female juvenile delinquents remains an area that is poorly understood for it being a minority phenomenon amongst other factors. The authors have arranged their texts into short sections making the explanations conducive for students to grasp and apply the arguments onto other contexts. There are also tabulated information that provide clearer comparison amongst the different cases and categories. I would suggest that the authors update the references to publications after 2000 so as to ensure contemporary social relevance to the readership.
Valuable resource for students
brilliant read! would recommend adopting in lessons as it is useful have a book in the classroom that specfically focuses on female offenders.
an excellent text that brings the plight of female offenders to the fore front of criminological research.
An excellent text that provides the reader with provocative but well balanced arguments. A must for all criminology students.
I am covering this course for another professor who uses an earlier this text. However, I will not be using this text for any future coverages. If you can get past all the biased language, incomplete statistics, incomparable comparisons and authors' self-citations, you are really left with a mediocre and partial glimpse into what might be important to gender differences in the system. No worries though, if you are unsure of what is said in one chapter, you will be assured to visit it again in just about every chapter there is in this book. In fact, my students submit Cornell style notes for my classes and this is the only class where the notes come back with comments such as "this chapter offers nothing new beyond what was offered in all other chapters..." I am rather disappointed that I have to pretty much replace the text with journal articles that better explain the whats, whys and wherefores that the required text should.
This is an essential read for any undergraduate student examining gender and crime. Topical, thorough and posing interesting debates throughout, this is an essential read within our gender and crime module
