Meda Chesney-Lind’s research while affiliated with University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and other places

What characterizes women's and girls’ pathways to crime?Girls, Women, and Crime: Selected Readings, Second Edition is a compilation of journal articles on the female offender written by leading researchers in the fields of criminology and women's studies. The contributors reveal the complex worlds females in the criminal justice system must often negotiate—worlds that are frequently riddled with violence, victimization, discrimination, and economic marginalization. This in-depth collection leaves readers with a greater understanding of the complexities and nuances of the realtionship between girls and women and crime.

We drew on the theory of gender and power and grounded theory methodology to explore how 18 Latina girls conceptualized power and control within their heterosexual dating relationships. Our findings indicate that boys/men used a number of strategies to control girls, including: regulating appearances and behaviors; cheating and threatening to cheat; and physical and sexual violence. Girls used a variety of strategies to resist these attempts to control them, including: lying, flirting, and cheating; reactive violence; breaking up; and maintaining emotional distance. Girls attempted to subvert boys' attempts to control them; however, these attempts were not always successful given the constraints of gender that adolescent females must negotiate.

arrests of girls increased more (or decreased less) than arrests of boys for most types of offenses. By 2004, girls accounted for 30 percent of all juvenile arrests. However, questions remain about whether these trends reflect an actual increase in girls’ delinquency or changes in societal responses to girls ’ behavior. To find answers to these questions, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) convened the Girls Study Group to establish a theoretical and empirical foundation to guide the development, testing, and dissemination of strategies to reduce or prevent girls ’ involvement in delinquency and violence. ■ ■ ■ The Girls Study Group Series, of which this Bulletin is a part, presents the Group’s Access OJJDP findings. The series examines issues such as patterns of offending among adolescents and how they differ for girls and boys; risk and protective factors associated publications online at with delinquency, including gender differences; and the causes and correlates of girls ’ delinquency.

One of the persistent problems with academic life is that one is encouraged to tell the truth, whether in research, the classroom, or the department meeting. For feminists, graduate school in particular stresses the importance of meticulously documenting girls' and women's lives, which have been rendered invisible by virtually all fields. Although these days the idea of truth is contentious, in the real world in which feminist academics and feminist criminologists in particular work, real problems that women confront (like sexual harassment, discrimination, and workplace violence) continue. Documenting these problems on their own campuses is a particular burden that feminist criminologists as well as others have taken on. It produces genuine challenges in a career that relies heavily on collegiality and civility. This article reflects on the costs of telling it like it is while also considering the long-term benefits, such as they are, of bringing the feminist perspective fully into the field of criminology.

This research evaluates the efficacy of a gender-specific, problem-solving court for girl offenders. Official statistics, interview data, and focus group data are utilized to determine whether the court is achieving its stated goals of reducing recidivism, risky behaviors, and confinement for the girls who attend this court program. The present research demonstrates that the program does seem to be effective in terms of reducing both recidivism and risky behavior as well as increasing the development of prosocial and healthy relationships. The article concludes with some lessons learned from the implementation of this court program as well as ideas for future research.

Girls suspected or convicted of assaults make up an increasing proportion of juvenile arrests and court caseloads. There is indication that changes in domestic violence arrest policies, school handling of student rules infractions, and practices of charging youth for assaults rather than status offenses account for these trends. To determine whether girls were treated more harshly for assaults after these policies changed, the present study compared the probabilities of conviction and institutionalization, net of the effect of self-reported attacks on persons, for 1980 and 2000. Data were from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts. Girls experienced a unique increase in the probabilities of justice system involvement that was replicated only for Black males. The increase was magnified for Black girls. Additional research is needed to better connect specific policies to drawing selected subgroups more deeply into the justice system and on the consequences for affected youth.

This article explores social and legal predictors of justice involvement for female juvenile offenders. Specifically, it examines the significance of trauma and marginalization in determinants of girls' detention and commitment as well as the formal decisions made about them. Using a mixed method approach of case file analysis and interview data, the authors explain the following overall findings: 1) detention is widely used on all offenders, most commonly justified in the conventional language of “protection” when applied to girls; 2) girls are more often committed to correctional facilities because of the effects (school failure and crystal methamphetamine use) of the sexual violence they experienced, and rarely for the violence they caused; and 3) for female juvenile offenders, juvenile justice decision makers consider histories of trauma and lack of resources as equally as important as offense histories when recommending them for commitment. This article concludes with implications for girl offenders and juvenile justice policy.

Mass incarceration has long characterized the landscape of adult criminal justice in the United States. Unlike other nations of the developed world that have sought to decrease their reliance on incarceration or at least kept incarceration rates level, our country has opted for penal sanctions for a wide array of offenses committed by adults (Mauer & Chesney-Lind, 2003). As a result, the United States has the dubious distinction of being the world's top incarcerator (Sentencing Project, 2007). We took this turn, as a country, during the late seventies, when politicians successfully convinced the American people that community-based and rehabilitative programs did not "work" for adult offenders, and that what was needed was a new "get tough" approach on crime. And get tough we did. Between 1970 and today, the U.S. prison population increased a staggering eightfold (Austin et al., 2007:6). The Pew Center on the States noted in a recent report on the phenomenon that our country now incarcerates nearly 1 out of 100 of our adult citizens (Warren et al., 2008).

Widely used risk/need assessment instruments assume that female offender risks for recidivism are essentially equivalent to those of male offenders. A look at the lives of female and male offenders reveals that there are important differences in the context of both offending and re-offending. This research draws on both quantitative and qualitative data to explore the effectiveness of a well known risk instrument to both predict recidivism and potentially direct intervention efforts. The results, particularly the in-depth interviews with offenders (both male and female) serving time on parole or felony probation reveal differences not detected by most contemporary risk and need assessment instruments. Ultimately, the gendered links among physical and sexual abuse, drugs, and crime are missed in risk and need assessments, thereby placing female offenders at risk for neglect and criminalization in an otherwise seemingly objective method of assessment.