Women in the Criminal Justice System - Research Paper Example

I. Introduction Even with current court rulings and legislations deliberated to eradicate gender-based prejudice in occupational services, the correctional system continues to be the most gender-discriminated, chauvinistic constituent of the criminal justice system. Women enmeshed in the system have been trying to displace the gender-discriminated foundation with one that provides them fair employment opportunities in higher positions or in central administrative offices, in training universities, and in all organizations. The right of women to work in their selected discipline or field should no longer be a questionable or legal matter for the reason that the courts and legislatures have by now concluded that right. Nevertheless, the experiences of several female correctional authorities and superintendents disclose that barriers are present that frequently thwart them from realizing their objective. In the continuing debate over the position of women in corrections, as expected, all the long-established labels about women have emerged. Women historically entered corrections as agents of change in the nineteenth century, a period of growing social disorders, abrupt changes in the position and role of women, and grand passion for change. The Women’s Prison Association, the Moral Reform Society and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were among the institutions that attempted to raise the welfare of women and of the larger society. The agents of change were women of the aristocratic and middle classes who sense a responsibility to be helpful in society. They were component of a significant development in the positions of women. On the other hand, the notion had surfaced, and was to become particularly felt in the Victorian period, that good women were domestic partners and mothers who had no job or work-related activities outside the home, even not belonging to the businesses of their husbands (Daly & Maher, 1998, 71). These women were dedicated to the “cult of true womanhood,” with its prominence on feminine submissiveness and meekness. But since the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, there were growing population of women from the upper classes who had obtained college diplomas, even higher and specialized degrees. Several of these educated women joined the workforce as educators, social workers, lawyers and the like, apart from becoming conventional domestic partners (Daly & Maher, 1998, 72). Women of this kind dealt with as best they could in a frequently unfriendly and antagonistic male realm. The penal system of the United States had, by the latter part of the eighteenth century, experienced a major transformation. Under the thrust of zealous religious conviction, it was concluded that the common punishments for criminal behaviors such as flogging, torture and death should be substituted by rehabilitation. Through religious guidance, contemplation on past mistakes, and diligence, criminals could be persuaded to perceive wickedness of their actions and to renounce their antisocial worldview (Feinman, 1994). Criminals hence renewed would be rescued from the chastisement of God and society. Women were not initially regarded as worthy of or able of reaping benefits from this novel framework. Female lawbreakers appeared particularly corrupted because they had abandoned the appropriate feminine place and carry out those things that only immoral men were expected to do. Since these women were apparently afar from salvation, negligible effort was initiated to help them, and circumstances in prisons became terrible. The insufficiency of institutions particularly for women implied that females were imprisoned in rooms, corridors, and upper floors of men’s prisons, segregated from the male prisoners but overseen by male sentinels. All women, in spite of age, crime, background, wellbeing or maternal condition, lived in one constricted space in the middle of continuous chaos (Feinman, 1994, 83). A number of prison authorities even became anxious that the congestion, bad health, deaths of infants, brawls, screams and assaults on guards could impact on the security, protection and wellbeing of male prisoners. Attempts to regulate the women through starving and torturing them did not succeed. In spite of the attempts by reformers, the torturing persisted because adjudicators concluded that physical force was deemed necessary to discipline and regulate inmates and compel them to obey. The public as well assumed that women offenders were more led astray than men and far from salvation. Merely a few individuals, encouraged by religious whims, tried to help them (Carrabine et al., 2004). Prison developers in the United States implemented the theories and practices formulated by Elizabeth Fry while she and her colleagues offered free assistance to reform female inmates in London in the nineteenth century. She assumed that female offenders could be changed if they were segregated from men and controlled and educated by responsible and religious women. Once isolated in an exclusive women prison, female criminals demanded a structured mechanism of discipline and control, hygiene, education, duties and religious guidance to guarantee their renewal to genuine womanhood. These insights shaped the theoretical and empirical groundwork in which women’s corrections evolved (Carrabine et al., 2004, 107). II. Superintendents Women who supervised these prisons were knowledgeable and experience in social work and reorganization. Complete data and information is accessible on seven of the original set of superintendents from 1884 to 1932: “they were well educated; three had Ph.D.s and one had a B.A. degree; two were married; all were white; all had experience as nurse, teacher, matron, or social workers; four actively supported women’s rights; and all were experiments and innovators” (Feinman, 1994, 91). Dr. Katherine B. Davis initiated an investigation and set up a venereal disease health care center at Bedford Hills in New York. In 1911 with financial support from John D. Rockefeller, she established a center for the research of the origins and sources of female felony. The time, in 1914, she became the foremost officer of correction in New York City she employed a colleague, Dr. Mary Harris as administrator of the women’s unit of the workhouse. Throughout the four-year term of Davis, she launched several reforms for every inmate and, together with Harris, instigated several adjustments that particularly benefitted the women. They substituted striped uniforms with yarn-dyed cotton clothes, provided shoes that perfectly fit, encouraged physicians to take care of and cure venereal diseases, and blockaded the courtyards so that women prisoners, for the very first time in the development of the workhouse, could go in the open-air (Howard & Newman, 2001, 117). The superintendent motivated prisoners to fulfill tasks and exercise outside as a way of developing proper work routines and alleviating world-weariness and pressure and with the aim of trimming down the pervasiveness of homosexual activity. In addition to instructive and work activities, they initiated the notion of self-independence so as to motivate a sense of accountability and residency among the prisoners. The superintendents did their best with the insignificant budgets allocated to run women’s penitentiaries. Consequently, treatment agendas for drug users and substance abusers were often missing. Harris expressed grief for the lack of agendas and the consequential high rate of relapsing into criminal behavior: “Unless we have built within them a wall of self-respect, moral integrity, and a desire to be an asset to the community instead of a menace, we have not protected society, which is ourselves, from the criminal” (Howard & Newman, 2001, 117-118). The initial set of superintendents had to deal with difficulties that persist to the present: the insufficiency of appropriate financial support for rehabilitation agendas and for compensations and the problem of attracting responsible, competent, concerned women to serve in the institutions. A physician, in 1934, talking about her observations at a facility for women, revealed that a superintendent would experience a difficult time drawing the attention and appointing competent officers for the reason that she could only offer a very small salary with accommodation, and the officer had to stay in the penitentiary for 24 hours a day, with a day off of two days every two weeks and a vacation of two weeks yearly. She finished off (Howard & Newman, 2001): “This is not tempting bait to a woman of ability and when one also considers the fear, which any normal woman may be expected to have, of entering ‘prison employment’, because of the physical risks she thinks she may run, it is a marvel that women’s prisons recruit such able matrons and staff members. The movies and Anne Vickers do not help in popularizing this line of work as a career” (p. 118). Numerous of the plans formulated by women such as Harris and Davis were motivated by the social activities of settlement quarters. The settlement quarter, an input of the nineteenth century to the requirement for social services in drastically developing industrialized metropolis of the East and West, offered a homelike environment for employees, normally white, and women from the middle class, who go to the local community to carry out their tasks. Davis and Harris, similar to several women who sooner or later became involved in corrections at some point in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had on one occasion worked in a settlement quarters. The notion of a home in which women reside and worked with others was effortlessly relocated to penal complexes when the women became superintendents (Howard &Newman, 2001) III. Correctional Officers Even though superintendents are the most discernible women in corrections, they remain to be out-populated by women correctional officers or, as they were normally referred to prior to the 1960s, matrons. Since the nineteenth century onwards, a great deal of our information regarding them are contained in accounts, reports, pieces of writing, and autobiographies of superintendents and a number of autobiographies of ex-convicts (Feinman, 1992). Incarcerated in 1919 because of a federal crime under the Espionage Act , Kate O’Hare disclosed her experiences at a state prison in Missouri through writing. It was a penitentiary for men with a particular wing for women; a male custodian was in supervision of a head matron and assistant matrons. O’Hare disapproved of the matrons, even though she empathized with several of the dilemmas they confronted (Feinman, 1992): “The matrons were required to live in the prison and were never, except on rare leaves of absence, out of the sights and sounds and smells of prison. They were prisoners to almost the same degree that we were, and they all staggered under a load of responsibility far too great for their limited intelligence and untrained powers. They handled human beings at their worst, and under the worst possible conditions, and saw nothing day or night but sordid, ugly things ungilded by the glow of hope or love” (p. 138). She as well vividly portrayed the melancholy of the lives of these women: “These women who were our keepers had missed love and wifehood; they had nothing to look back upon or forward to. There is a sort of stigma attached to their work that makes the possibilities of love and mating for them very limited indeed. The ordinary social relations of normal life were impossible for them, and they lived in a very inferno of loneliness and isolation! (Feinman, 1992, 138-39). However, it is not simple to oversimplify about female correctional officers since their working circumstances, compensations and the women have transformed since the 1970s and since there is no regularity among all correctional divisions (Prenzler, 2007). A study carried out by the Center for Women Policy studies made public that women mentioned about career opportunities and compensations, in addition to interest in the job, as justifications for looking for employment in corrections. The study of Joanne Belknap (1991) of female correctional officers in a prison located at the Midwestern section discovered that the women preferred to become offices due to the compensation packages, promotional prospects, interest or challenge in the job, their duty in other jobs in the criminal justice, wanting to be of assistance to people, or faith that it was a professional path to becoming a law enforcer or patrol officer. IV. Conclusions The status of women in corrections has upgraded significantly since the initiation of women’s corrections in 1873 (Denno, 1994, 85). Women have experienced becoming officers, superintendents, custodian of men’s and women’s institutions, and authorities in both male and female facilities. Nevertheless, several male authorities and superintendents continue to embrace the stereotypical representation of woman and their role in the larger society. As a result, the success that women in corrections have attained is spoiled due to the antagonism and harassment they should deal with from a number of their male coworkers. Women look for jobs in corrections for the similar rationales that men have: the system provides individuals with no advanced developed competencies and without a diploma beyond high school a stable employment, adequate salaries and benefits, and prospects for promotion. For marginalized women, corrections provide career prospects on the basis of civil service examinations with no consideration to race or ethnicity. Nevertheless successful females in corrections have been, the latest specialists should still exert much effort to eradicate the long-established stereotypical representation of women who pioneered women’s corrections. This representation has confirmed to be the most complicated to surpass since it so widespread in society and so voluntarily recognized by some women and men alike. The view of women, which is quite patronizing, truly appreciative, and coldhearted, is demonstrated in the history of women who have turned out to be experts in the criminal justice system. They have been anticipated to stick on their traditional womanly functions within the system in sustaining their womanly capabilities. As long as they hang about in their expected roles, they were approved and welcomed in the system. For instance, the first women to join corrections and law enforcement would appear to have been abandoning the direct route towards womanly desirable quality, according to which not anything was to be carried out that conveyed them into contact with the realities of society or with rudeness of any sort. But in reality they evaded most disapproval for the reason that they did not deviate from definitely defined, long-established womanly roles; they were mothers, daughters and sisters, not guards and law enforcers. Both the catalysts of change and, eventually, the first salaried professionals made use of the virgin/whore duality to maintain the women offenders demanded their own secluded institutions where personnel made up of wholly of moral and responsible women would boost the morale of the fallen to their appropriate place in society. In the near future women will establish a grand system of their own in which men are primarily excluded. There are several assumptions proposed by experts in the criminal justice system to rationalize why women commit felonies and what the potential of that unlawful pattern could be. Here, as well, conventional perspectives have been bonded to the virgin/whore duality with its idea of a fall from grace and its stress on domesticity as the medium for rehabilitation; and hardly any has transformed in this regard. Assumptions formulated to elaborate on the nature of female felony are no more entrenched in reality at present than they were a hundred year ago in spite of the buildup of volumes of figures and statistical data. Always, it appears, some researchers go beyond their limitations to look for unusual sources of criminal behavior of women, such as the case of the women’s movement, when several of the explanations are evident in poverty, lack of education, substance abuse and inadequate opportunity. As long as women confront racial prejudice and sexual harassment, lack of employment opportunity, and a restricted number of occupations that, for the most part compensate them inadequately, they will represent a large group living at or below the poverty threshold. Those who turn out to be dependent on substances such as drugs or alcohol will be trapped in a particularly inhuman bind for the reason that their addiction will weaken their ability to fulfill their task and will commit the minor crimes of robbery and prostitution the most available means of surviving. References Belknap J. (1991). “Women in Conflict: An Analysis of Women Correctional Officers". Women & Criminal Justice. Carrabine, E. et al. (2004). Criminology: A Sociological Introduction. New York: Routledge. Cohn, E. G. et al. (1998). Evaluating Criminology and Criminal Justice . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Daly K. (1989). "Gender and Varieties of White-Collar Crime". Criminology 27. Daly, K. & Maher, L. (1998). Criminology at the Crossroads: Feminist Readings in Crime and Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Denno, D. W. (1994). Gender, Crime and the Criminal Law Defenses. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology , 80-180. Feinman C. (1992). 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