Ira Sommers

Getting out of the life: Crime desistance by female street offenders

Although increased attention is being paid to gender variations in the nature and extent of crime, little has been done to describe the termination of criminal careers by female offenders. This paper describes how 30 women with long histories of criminal involvement changed their perspectives toward life and criminal behavior. Changes in criminal behavior occurred as a result of a three‐stage process: building resolve or discovering motivation to stop (i.e., socially disjunctive experiences), making and publicly disclosing the decision to stop, and maintaining new behaviors and integration into new social networks. Desistance appears to be a process as complex and lengthy as the processes of initial involvement. Overall, the social processes and turning points described by the women in the present research are quite similar to those reported by men in previous studies.

The Situational Context of Violent Female Offending

The study examines the elements involved in female perpetration of robbery and aggravated assault including motive, victim precipitation, victim-offender relationship, accomplices, precipitating circumstances, preparation, and use of weapons. The data suggest that there are clear underlying differences in the perpetration of violent crimes. They show that robbery is more frequently planned, more impersonal, and more instrumental than assault. Assault was clearly an impulsive criminal offense. However, it was not totally irrational. Each womans actions were a function of the victims behavior and the implications of that behavior for defending ones well-being or public self-concept. The data indicate that lifestyle factors (e.g., peer association, serious drug use) are associated with participation in robbery. The findings also suggest that the womens lifestyles and routine activities increased their probability of exposure to situations that were associated with more serious disputes. In addition to differences in the underlying motivation or meaning of violence, there appear to be different behavioral patterns within the study samples. Women involved in robbery, particularly those involved in both robbery and assault, were disproportionately involved in other criminal activities, particularly drug sales, and were more deeply entrenched in addictive drug use.

Sex, Race, Age, and Violent Offending

Although there is an increase in attention being paid to race and sex variations in crime and delinquency, little has been done to disaggregate the “gender-ratio” problem in order to account for participation in particular offenses, specifically different types of violent crime. Virtually all of the research pertaining to the interaction of gender, race and -violent crime focuses on murder and dichotomizes race into white and black, or white and nonwhite. This paper uses New York City arrest data to examine the extent of violence within various race-sex-crime subgroups. Rates of violent offending (i.e., homicide, robbery, assault, and burglary) are presented for black, Hispanic and white males and females. Regardless of violent crime type, black and Hispanic females exhibited high rates of offending relative to white females. Furthermore, the violent offending rates of black females paralleled those of white males. These findings suggest that an examination of gender differences in violent offending, independent of race, will produce incomplete and potentially misleading interpretations. The paper also provides a social structural explanation of the disproportionate involvement of black females (and males) in violent crime.

Assessing the impact of psychiatric impairment on prison violence

Abstract To contribute to the slowly growing body of research on psychiatrically impaired inmates, the present study examined linkages between various forms of psychopathology and several types of prison violence. Measures of psychiatric impairment were derived from the New YorkState Office of Mental Health Level of Care Survey and included manifest symptomatology, confusion, and depression. Violence against property, staff, other inmates and, finally, violence toward the self comprised the measures of prison violence. The relationships among measures of psychiatric impairment and prison violence were examined using logit analysis. Controlling for sociodemographic and other suspected correlates of violent behavior, the study found that only certain forms of psychiatric impairment increased the probability of violent behavior within the prison context. Three psychiatric impairment scales were examined: depression was related to violence toward the self, confusion increased violence toward other inmates and toward staff, and depression and confusion increased violence toward property. The research suggests that more attention needs to be paid to the mental-health risk factors associated with prison violence and to other management problems posed by the psychiatrically impaired inmate.

Ideology and Discourse Some Differences Between State-Planned and Community-Based Justice*

Ethnographic methods were used to study alternative dispute resolution as practiced by two mediation projects. Observations of actual mediation sessions, interviews with key informants, and archival data were used. The authors found that the projects could be distinguished according to (a) uses of coercion and consensus in effecting a resolution, (b) the type of posturing that took place between mediator and disputants, and (c) the type of discourse employed. The authors argue that differences between the two projects emanated from whether the project was planned and executed by a state agency or whether it was community-based.

Social selection and mental health service utilization among mentally ill parolees: A research agenda

The purpose of this article is to describe a conceptual and methodological approach to research on mental health service utilization by parolees with mental illness. This approach can be used by researchers and policy makers to understand and improve the interface between criminal justice and mental health organizations. We justify the need for research on this population; discuss the conceptual framework which draws on social selection and organizational theory; describe methodological problems; and discuss implications of the research.