Role of Race, Class, and Gender in Criminal Justice Policy Development - Research Paper Example

message from dear client, this is a draft. I’m still revising some parts of the paper. I will inform you once the fully revised paper has been uploaded. I will upload the finalized paper asap. thanks =) sincerely, writer Role of Race, Class, and Gender in Criminal Justice Policy Development Today, one of the overwhelming issues that the United States confronts is whether criminal justice policing is just, or whether they are prejudiced based on race, class, and/or gender. Even though blatant racism is undemocratic and unlawful nowadays, the memories of genocide and slavery keep on troubling the nation. Women are presently active in their participation in the labor market, both professional and skilled, but are still paid less compared to their male counterparts. And even though a larger number of American people are now experiencing economic convenience, the population of children in poverty and recurrently jobless adults is anything but decreasing. Criminologists have also developed a substantial literature examining sex effects, and there has been some attention to the class-based nature of court decisions. Most studies emphasize only one of these dimensions at a time, however, and generally they focus solely on the defendant. Nevertheless, a few researchers have developed more complex analyses of the subtle and dynamic ways in which race, gender, and class converge. Sex and gender are sometimes used interchangeably. As I use these terms, sex refers to the classification of people as men or women on the basis of biological criteria; gender refers to socially learned aspects of human identity. Thus, gender is not simply a category, attribution, or role, it is a dynamic process of constructing particular ways of being masculine or feminine (see similarly Martin and Jurik 1996). Gender was largely ignored by criminologists until the late 1970s and 1980s, and even then attention spotlighted sex differences in crime commission and sanctioning rather than questioning the gendered nature of crimes by men and of the criminal justice system’s response to men’s crimes (Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988; Simpson 1989). Nevertheless, a growing body of scholarship has coalesced around the question of sex differences in sentencing. This research examines whether sex differences exist, how gender conditions leniency, and why sex differences arise. The first question concerns whether sex differences arise. The most comprehensive recent summary of this research is provided by Daly and Bordt (1995). They analyzed published findings from 50 court datasets to assess whether significant sex differences favoring women were related to the statistical procedures used, court contexts, sample composition (including race), and how the research was conceptualized (e.g., gender focused or not). Approximately half of the studies found results favoring women, with another one-quarter reporting mixed results or no significant effects. Overall, sex differences favoring women are most visible in studies of felony offenses, among cases prosecuted in felony courts, and in courts located in urban areas. Sex differences are also most pronounced in the decision (not) to incarcerate, rather than in sentence length. For example, Daly (1994), Farnworth and Teske (1995), Steffensmeier, Kramer, and Streifel (1993), and Ulmer and Kramer (1996) found substantial gender gaps— of about 10 percentage points—in the likelihood of incarceration for men and women during the mid-1980s, even after controlling for many relevant factors. As was the case for race, sentencing guidelines and determinate sentencing were supposed to eradicate sex differences in sentencing. This has not occurred, however, at least under California, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Federal guidelines. For example, Nagel and Johnson (1994) examined drug, larceny, and embezzlement cases in Federal court after the guidelines went into effect, finding that favorable treatment of female offenders persists. This effect was particularly pronounced for drug offenses, with 14.3 percent of female drug offenders receiving downward departures under Federal guidelines compared with 6.7 percent of male drug offenders (p. 219). The question of whether women and men should receive the same or different treatment has sparked considerable debate in recent years. An emphasis on sameness minimizes differences between men and women and advocates equal treatment based on gender-neutral implementation of the law. The standard against which all defendants are held, however, continues to be males. Nagel and Johnson (1994) exemplify the sameness perspective, arguing that equality requires that men and women be treated strictly the same, with any leniency seen as a reflection of unwarranted paternalism. The result has been tremendous increases in the rates of incarceration of women and in their confinement for longer periods of time than in the past, without any equality in the programs available to male and female inmates or in their health care while in prison (Belknap 1996; Richie 1996). The difference framework emphasizes women’s special needs while pregnant and caring for small children, and women’s experiences as victims of rape and battering. This perspective also takes males as the standard, and advocating for special protections risks reinforcing patriarchal dominance and stereotypic images of women. However, special protections also open the door to drug treatment and other nonincarcerative options. Most feminist research today tries to move beyond this dichotomy, examining instead how the criminal law reinforces gender inequality and contributes to women’s economic and social deprivation through its support of patriarchal interests (Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988; Roberts 1994; Scales 1986; Simpson and Elis 1995; Smart 1989). As Roberts suggests: The aim of eliminating preferential treatment for women wrongly assumes that the sentencing system is basically fair. Uniform sentencing is not fair, however, if embedded in sentencing schemes is a male-based model that presumes a potentially violent criminal who is not the primary caretaker of young children. (p. 13) A second major emphasis evidenced in the literature is the attempt to determine exactly how gender conditions leniency—among which women and under what circumstances. The answer seems to be women with families, but two different reasons have been posited. The first, articulated most clearly by Candace Kruttschnitt, points to gender-based family roles. Kruttschnitt proposed that incarceration is less necessary to control the behavior of women than men because women’s economic dependence on their husbands and other relatives affords families additional, informal mechanisms of social control (Kruttschnitt 1984; Kruttschnitt and Green 1984). The second approach, which has been most clearly presented by Kathleen Daly (1987, 1989), emphasizes a familialbased paternalism that distinguishes between female defendants with and without children, and then grants greater leniency to those women who have children because of the practical expenses (e.g., foster care) of incarcerating women with children (see also Daly 1994; Steffensmeier, Kramer, and Streifel 1993; Ulmer and Kramer 1996). Bickle and Peterson (1991) explored these two theses in their study of Federal forgery offenders. Like Daly (1989), they found that race helped explain the effects of the family variables, but they also found that for black women having children is not sufficient—they must also be seen as good mothers to receive leniency based on family variables. More specifically, “black women do not benefit from simply occupying this central family role; they must perform it well” (1991, 388). Bickle and Peterson also add to Kruttschnitt’s thesis, finding that the sentencing advantages of being married are greater for black women than for white women, and that white women but not black women are penalized for living alone (pp. 386, 388). They conclude, “[t]he significance of the influence of family role variables cannot be described or interpreted in terms of either race or sex alone. Patterns of interaction encompass both race and gender” (p. 390). Read More