The authors this week all proposed the fundamental issue with current theories as the ignoring of the female gender and how current theories assume motives for crime to be equal across genders. Simpson (1989) and Chesney-Lind (2006) take the biggest stance on how not only gender influences criminal perspectives but race as well. This is an extremely important notion. Colored women do not experience the chivalry that white women are often afforded under the system. While the current belief is that women in general are subjected to less harsher punishments than men, this is simply not the case. Black women are incarcerated at nearly the same rate as white men. This is significantly less than their counterparts, but with their continued damnation by the media their rates of incarceration could see a dramatic increase as self-fulfilling prophecy takes hold. Another important factor that has caused women to often receive lenient sentences is the notion of the nuclear family. It is important to note that women are often giver probation or pre-trail release when they have a family because they are expected to take care of them. The idea that women have to care for their families is a societal and cultural construct that has labeled women as the expected caregiver. Even with all of the progress feminists have made since the 1960s, women are still expected to be the …show more content…
Female experiences are drastically different than male experiences and do play an important role in their motivations to commit crime. Daly (1997) also brings up the issue that the law greatly reinforces gender roles and expected victims. Despite all the work feminist theorists have done to attempt to reconstruct women’s roles as victims, the law is still reinforcing gendered roles of