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Social Status and Sentences of Female Offenders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Candace Kruttschnitt
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Abstract

To date, most disposition studies have been limited to exploring the effects of male defendants' social characteristics on severity of disposition; the few studies that have included female defendants have done so primarily to see if the sex of the offenders differentially affected sentencing. Utilizing the propositions set forth in The Behavior of Law (Black, 1976), this research looks at the role played by a woman's social status in determining the type of criminal court disposition she receives. Conviction data from a sample of 1,034 female defendants are explored to estimate the effects of (1) economic rank (2) prior criminal record, (3) age, and (4) employment status, controlling for the offense of conviction, on severity of criminal court disposition. The analyses indicate that women's various social characteristics are in fact good predictors of the nature and extent of their sentences and, further, that indicators of respectability and stratification/social integration contribute most to explaining these criminal court dispositions. Accordingly, the propositions of Black's theory of law are generally supported by the results of this study.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , 1981 , pp. 247 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the National Institute of Mental Health for financial support. Appreciation should also be extended to the following individuals for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Donald Black, Harold Finestone, James Inverarity, Richard Petronio, Robert Robinson, Bert Kritzer, Tom Hart, and two anonymous reviewers.

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