Gender, Crime, and Punishment - Hardcover

Daly, Ms. Kathleen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300059558 ISBN 13: 9780300059557

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Are men and women who are persecuted for similar crimes punished differently? If it is true, as is commonly assumed, that women are sentenced more leniently than men, does this tendency vary by class and race? In this book Kathleen Daly explores these issues by analyzing women's and men's cases that are routinely processed in felony courts - cases of homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, larceny, and drug offenses. Daly first presents a statistical analysis of sentencing disparity for a wide sample of cases. Then, from within this sample, she compares forty matched pairs of women and men accused and convicted of statutorily similar offenses, examining in each case the presentence investigation reports and transcripts of the remarks made in court on the day of sentencing. From these documents, Daly constructs a portrait of each defendant and a narrative for each crime, and she identifies the theory of punishment the judge used to justify the sentence imposed. She analyzes whether men and women are pulled into crime in different ways, whether their offenses are comparably serious, and whether court officials use different conceptions of justice in sentencing men and women. By providing both numerical and narrative descriptions of crime and punishment, Daly shows the inadequacies of quantitative analysis: although her statistics, like those of other studies, suggest that women are favored, her close comparison of the matched pairs indicates that gender differences are negligible when the details of the cases are taken into consideration.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In this book Kathleen Daly explores whether men and women who are convicted of similar crimes are punished differently. Analyzing cases of homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, larceny, and drug offenses, she challenges the common assumption that women are treated more leniently than men and shows that in fact gender disparities in sentencing are negligible and are not always advantageous to women.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0300059558
• ISBN 13: 9780300059557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352