Book Review: The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime (2nd edn), Girls, Women and Crime: Selected Readings
| Author | Stephanie Hayman |
| DOI | 10.1177/146680250500500207 |
| Published date | 01 May 2005 |
| Date | 01 May 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
effectiveness of criminal justice in contemporary society’ (p. ix), while also
going beyond the confines of the ‘standard’ criminology text, it is aiming high.
It is a tall order—but one which it does extremely well in its attempt to
fulfil.
Reference
Walklate, S. (2004) Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice, 2nd edn. Cullompton:
Willan Publishing.
Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko
The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime (2nd edn)
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003. 216 pp. £54.00
ISBN 0–7619–2978–9 (hbk); £25.00 ISBN 0–7619–2405–1 (pbk)
Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko (eds)
Girls, Women and Crime: Selected Readings
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003. 259 pp. £24.99
ISBN 0–7619–2828–6 (pbk)
•Reviewed by Stephanie Hayman, Kingston University, UK
It was instructive to be reading these books in the days leading up to the fiercely
contested presidential election in the United States of America. Both candidates
were attempting to outdo each other in demonstrating their commitment to
prosecuting a ‘war on terror’. While condemning what they characterized as an
assault on the USA by those rejecting American values of decency and
democracy, they spared relatively little thought for those who had fallen
between the cracks of American society itself; the USA’s prisoners. In the
second, revised edition of The Female Offender Chesney-Lind and Pasko focus
on criminalized women, showing clearly how they are disproportionately
affected by the USA’s punitive stance towards offenders, despite the relatively
small numbers of offending females.
The strength of The Female Offender is that it initially focuses on young
women, rather than viewing women as an undifferentiated group, and charts
the many ways in which they are initially caught by the criminal justice system
and their consequent ‘pathways’ into adult criminality. Chesney-Lind and
Pasko outline convincingly the racialized nature of juvenile justice, which
results in disproportionate numbers of women of colour subsequently filling
the USA’s adult prisons. The authors offer persuasive evidence of the way that
judges circumvent moves towards community-based sanctions. They contend
that juvenile justice is now a ‘two-track system’, with white girls being steered
towards private institutions to be ‘helped’ and ‘cured’, while non-whites end up
Book Reviews 201
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