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Example research essay topic: Years In Prison Chesney Lind - 1,999 words

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Female Criminals Western domination of women and nature was conceptually linked into the processes of making them inferior and had mutually reinforced each other. For example, Merchant (op. cit. p. 165) argues that from its beginning the discourse of modern science in the West was informed by imagery that portrayed nature as female.

Given womens status this both aided and made erotic the domination of nature for men of science. Woman was interconnected with the exploration of nature having love for plants and animals. Man was identified with spirit, mind, and power over both, woman and nature. Power must be analyzed as something, which circulates, or rather as something, which only functions in the form of a chain.

It is never localized here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. However, power usually causes negative consequences. Patriarchal woman-nature connection justifies male domination and abuse, but states that there is some deep positive connection between woman, nature, and peace. According to Merchant women are not hunters, but food gatherers and also the inventors of agriculture. For instance, women are nurturers and life-givers. For this reason, they had a great respect by early humans, who had different sculptures of God in female image.

Throughout the time, women have seen as inferior and more passive than males, which had brought the belief to many that women are less able or even not able at all to commit crime. In many societies, such a belief was severely shaken over the last 30 years, when women together with the increase of their roles in the society had also firmly proved that they are capable of doing things women never did before. Each person in this world tries to pursue his or her dream. Centuries ago, dreams of women were much different from what it appears to be today. Women mainly relied on husbands and almost all their dreams were connected with family well-being. Nowadays the situation had changed.

The increase of female crime occurred mainly due to emancipation. For many women the accumulation of material goods and wealth, which their parents never had, and which are so common in our country, pushes them to the limit. We should not forget about another drives for pursuing the dream high determination to succeed and high self-image. High self-image presses on the person to achieve recognition and fame; however, money remains the main cause of female delinquent behavior.

In a hostile environment, high willpower increases womans aggression and desire to act using all available means in order to achieve the goal. Women crime level has been rising together with women achieving equal rights with men. The majority of crimes committed by women are not violent. Despite the fact that the percentage of crimes committed by women has always been significantly smaller than those of men, it is important to note the major increase in the number of women arrested for criminal activity (specifically non-violent) over the past few decades.

While criminologists insist that female offenders represent only a fraction of the crime perpetrated in our society, the numbers of female criminals appear to be growing. Some act out in male-female teams while many initiate crimes on their own. Female killers get more press than offenders in other types of crimes, yet the less violent behaviors still do reveal a lot about women who break the law. Women end up in prison mainly because they are fighting against abuse, which in many cases can be a single way to protect themselves and their children. The majority of violent crimes committed by women fall into this category.

Some women are also duped by boyfriends or spouses to become part of an illegal operation, and they unwittingly participate and are arrested. It is possible to discover the motives driving women to commit crime after observing criminal cases in which women were involved. Late night in August 1997, a Tacoma, Washington, woman named Brenda Lee Working called her estranged husband, Michael, and told him that her car had broken down, stranding her and their two preschool daughters in a wooded area on a military base. When Michael Working came to her aid, it turned out to be an ambush. Brenda shot him several times, hitting him in the arm and the shoulder.

Then she beat him in the face with the handgun as he tried to wrench it from her hands and stalked him through the woods for hours after he managed to get away. Brenda Workings sentence for the attempted murder of her husband: one day in jail. Admittedly, this was not the full extent of Workings punishment: she received a separate five-year jail sentence for using a gun in the commission of a crime. Yet the sentencing judge, U. S. District Judge Jack Tanner, openly stated that he would have suspended that sentence too if it had not been mandatory under federal law.

His reasoning was that Working had been depressed and fearful that her estranged husband would take away her children in a custody battle. In April, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 9 th Circuit overturned the sentence, ruling that Tanner had improperly departed from the sentencing guidelines without adequate reasons. The case was sent back to the lower court and reassigned to another judge. The 9 th Circuits ruling made an unusual explicit reference to gender bias, stating that Tanner would be unlikely to set aside considerations of Workings sex.

Despite the eventual outcome, many would say the Working case illustrates a pervasive pattern in the criminal justice system of gender-based leniency toward women. This has become an article of faith among mens rights activists. In his 1993 book The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell asserts, twelve distinct female-only defenses allow a woman who commits a premeditated murder to have the charges dropped or significantly reduced. This sensational claim is seriously exaggerated. Of the 12 items listed by Farrell, only three insanity pleas based on premenstrual syndrome or postpartum depression and self-defense or insanity pleas based on battered woman syndrome can accurately be called female-only defenses. However, even with such a type of defense used there is little chance to succeed.

The rest of Farrell's list consists of factors that contribute to more-lenient treatment of women, from stereotypes that make women less likely suspects to protective husbands standing by wives who have committed violence against them or their children. Nonetheless, the pattern does exist. Two Justice Department studies in the late 1980 s found that male offenders were more than twice as likely as women charged with similar crimes to be incarcerated for more than a year, and that even allowing for other factors, such as prior convictions, women were more likely to receive a light sentence. The disparities are especially striking in family murders, the primary form of homicide committed by women.

A Justice Department study of domestic homicides in 1988 found that 94 percent of men who were convicted of (or pled guilty to) killing their spouses received prison sentences, but only 81 percent of the women did. The average sentence was 16. 5 years for husbands and a mere six years for wives. Some of the difference was because more of the women had been provoked that is, assaulted or threatened prior to the killing. However, when there had been no provocation, the average prison sentence was seven years for killer wives and 17 years for killer husbands. Beyond the numbers, the contrast between the treatment of male and female defendants can be shocking in individual cases. In 1995, Texas executed Jesse Dewayne Jacobs for a murder that, by the prosecutors admission, was committed by his sister, Bobbie Jean Hogan.

Hogan -- who had gotten Jacobs to help her abduct her boyfriends ex-wife and had actually pulled the trigger -- served 10 years in prison. She was convicted only of involuntary manslaughter after her lawyers managed to persuade the jury that the gun went off accidentally. Old-fashioned chivalry undoubtedly plays a role. Women and men do occupy separate places in the collective psyche of society, Jonathan Last wrote approvingly in The Weekly Standard in 1998, shortly after the execution of ax murderer Karla Faye Tucker. Because society has a low tolerance for seeing them harmed, women even criminals have traditionally been treated differently by the justice system. Differently, but still, at least possibly, with justice.

In recent years, this chivalry has declined. Yet while it is no longer acceptable to argue that female criminals are due special consideration because they are women, many feminists insistence on seeing women as victims of patriarchy sometimes has the same effect. Most anti-domestic violence activists, for instance, cling to the dogma that women kill only in response to male violence. The battered womens clemency movement has obtained pardons for female murderers who, as subsequent investigations found, had very flimsy claims of abuse and probably had been driven by masculine motives, such as jealousy. Other cases never go to trial. In Brooklyn in 1987, Marlene Wagshall shot her sleeping husband, Joshua, in the stomach, crippling him for life, after finding a photo of him with a scantily clad woman.

Wagshall was charged with attempted murder, but because of her uncorroborated assertion that her husband had beaten her, District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, a strong champion of womens rights, let her plead guilty to assault with a sentence of one day in jail and five years probation. Even when feminists do not actively defend violent women, they hardly ever speak up against inappropriate leniency toward female defendants. Mostly, they refuse to admit that such leniency exists perhaps because it would be heresy to concede that patriarchy that has sometimes worked in womens favored prefer to focus on real or mythical instances in which the justice system treats women more harshly. (Battered womens advocates have promoted the fictional factoid that a woman who kills her mate is sentenced to an average of 15 to 20 years in prison, while a man gets two to six years). As a result, if a man commits a violent crime against a woman and gets off lightly, an outcry from womens groups often follows.

If it is the other way round, the only vocal protests are likely to come from the victims family and from prosecutors. The Working case, like the Wagshall case, received minimal publicity. Imagine the reaction if a judge had said publicly that a man who had ambushed and shot his estranged wife should have been spared prison because he was depressed over the divorce. There are feminists, such as Patricia Pearson, author of the 1997 book When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, who find feminist paternalism toward women no less distasteful than the traditional kind. They argue that in the end, excusing womens violence on the grounds of emotional problems may undercut womens ability to be seen as capable workers and leaders. That may or may not happen.

Nevertheless, even if women stand to lose nothing from the new double standards, any self-respecting feminist should still oppose them in the name of equal justice. Bibliography: Pearson, P. (1997) When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence Chesney-Lind, M. (1980) Rediscovering Lileth: Misogyny and the New Female Criminality, in Taylor Griffiths, C. and Nance, M. (eds. ) The Female Offenders. Simon Fraser University, New York. Last, J. The Weekly Standard, April 4, 1998 Chesney-Lind, M. (1998) Women Under Lock and Key: A View from the Inside.

The Prison Journal. 76 (2): 47 - 65. Smart, C. (1979) The New Female Criminal: Reality or Myth? British Journal of Criminology, Vol 19, pp. 50 - 59. The Death of Nature - Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution Merchant, C. (1980), San Francisco Harper Collins. Leonard, Eileen B. (1982) Women, Crime and Society: A Critique of Criminology Theory. NY: Longman.

White, R. and Haines, F. (1996) Crime and Criminology: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York.


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Research essay sample on Years In Prison Chesney Lind

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