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Authors: David Canter
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ten crimes. The crimes that women commit are generally different from those of men. Women commit far fewer violent crimes and are less likely to be involved in gang crimes or have long careers as criminals. If a woman commits a crime, it’s more likely to be fraud of one sort or another, except of course for the illegal activity dominated by women – prostitution (although here, again, who ends up convicted of prostitution varies enormously depending on the local laws).
The criminal justice system tends to deal with convicted women differently from convicted men, with court decisions often being more lenient for women. This leniency is sometimes because of the effect on children of being separated from their mother while she’s in prison, or even the assumption that women aren’t inherently wicked and that there are some exonerating circumstances which can lower the severity of a woman’s sentence. Not uncommonly, people assume that for a woman to commit a crime she must be mentally disturbed, and so she may get a sentence that’s regarded as a form of treatment. Courts accept a whole host of psychological conditions as explanations for a woman’s illegal actions, which I talk about in Chapter 11.
Sometimes the leniency of the courts can only be put down to a form of ‘chivalry’, with the judge taking pity on an apparently defenceless, seemingly harmless woman as against the glowering, burly, tattooed man!
Not all alcohol and drug addicts become criminals. If the person who’s addicted can afford to pay for his addiction through legitimate means and manages his intake so that it doesn’t interfere with his work, he may never become a criminal other than in the act of purchasing illegal drugs. These addicts are more likely to destroy their relationships and health, becoming a social burden rather than a criminal.
As well as alcoholism or drug addiction causing crime, the opposite may also be true: criminals becoming addicts. From the proceeds of crime a criminal can afford to get hold of substances previously out of reach and by mixing with addicted criminals he gets drawn into addiction himself. Drugs may well be easier to obtain in prison than outside, and so a term inside can open the way to addiction.
Passing it on in the blood
Every now and then a pundit comes up with yet another attempt to explain the causes of crime by citing some aspect of the criminals’ biological or physiological make-up. These include:
Brain damage or dysfunction
Genetic inheritance
Hormones, especially testosterone and low serotonin levels
Physical stature
One bizarre suggestion is that the cause of crime is in the water! Apparently, some indicators suggest that increased levels of the chemical silicon fluoride in drinking water are related to higher rates of violent crime.
The problem with accepting any of these reasons as a primary cause of criminality is that plenty of other people sharing the same aspects never commit crimes. So although physiological characteristics may sometimes contribute indirectly, they’re unlikely to be the direct cause of crime.
Blaming Darwin
A curious idea that’s sometimes aired is that an evolutionary advantage exists to many forms of crime, especially crimes against the person: violent humans are more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
The claim is that if men in prehistory raped then that behaviour increased the likelihood of offspring being conceived and born and thus increasing the genetic availability of whatever genes made rape more likely in the first case. Some criminologists even claim that murder is part of the human evolutionary make-up, because when limited food is around for hunter-gatherers or fertile women are scarce, killing off competitive males increases the chances of survival.
Fascinating though these evolutionary theories may be, they still don’t explain away the most prevalent types of crime, burglary and other
The criminal justice system tends to deal with convicted women differently from convicted men, with court decisions often being more lenient for women. This leniency is sometimes because of the effect on children of being separated from their mother while she’s in prison, or even the assumption that women aren’t inherently wicked and that there are some exonerating circumstances which can lower the severity of a woman’s sentence. Not uncommonly, people assume that for a woman to commit a crime she must be mentally disturbed, and so she may get a sentence that’s regarded as a form of treatment. Courts accept a whole host of psychological conditions as explanations for a woman’s illegal actions, which I talk about in Chapter 11.
Sometimes the leniency of the courts can only be put down to a form of ‘chivalry’, with the judge taking pity on an apparently defenceless, seemingly harmless woman as against the glowering, burly, tattooed man!
Not all alcohol and drug addicts become criminals. If the person who’s addicted can afford to pay for his addiction through legitimate means and manages his intake so that it doesn’t interfere with his work, he may never become a criminal other than in the act of purchasing illegal drugs. These addicts are more likely to destroy their relationships and health, becoming a social burden rather than a criminal.
As well as alcoholism or drug addiction causing crime, the opposite may also be true: criminals becoming addicts. From the proceeds of crime a criminal can afford to get hold of substances previously out of reach and by mixing with addicted criminals he gets drawn into addiction himself. Drugs may well be easier to obtain in prison than outside, and so a term inside can open the way to addiction.
Passing it on in the blood
Every now and then a pundit comes up with yet another attempt to explain the causes of crime by citing some aspect of the criminals’ biological or physiological make-up. These include:
Brain damage or dysfunction
Genetic inheritance
Hormones, especially testosterone and low serotonin levels
Physical stature
One bizarre suggestion is that the cause of crime is in the water! Apparently, some indicators suggest that increased levels of the chemical silicon fluoride in drinking water are related to higher rates of violent crime.
The problem with accepting any of these reasons as a primary cause of criminality is that plenty of other people sharing the same aspects never commit crimes. So although physiological characteristics may sometimes contribute indirectly, they’re unlikely to be the direct cause of crime.
Blaming Darwin
A curious idea that’s sometimes aired is that an evolutionary advantage exists to many forms of crime, especially crimes against the person: violent humans are more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
The claim is that if men in prehistory raped then that behaviour increased the likelihood of offspring being conceived and born and thus increasing the genetic availability of whatever genes made rape more likely in the first case. Some criminologists even claim that murder is part of the human evolutionary make-up, because when limited food is around for hunter-gatherers or fertile women are scarce, killing off competitive males increases the chances of survival.
Fascinating though these evolutionary theories may be, they still don’t explain away the most prevalent types of crime, burglary and other
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