From: mec6@quads.uchicago.edu (rini)
Subject: Re: violence
Reply-To: mec6@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 17:29:03 GMT

bhv@areaplg2.corp.mot.com (Bronis Vidugiris) writes:

>Statistics such as those I quoted earlier have convinced me that the
>judicial system is biased against men, ancedotal evidence to the contrary.

Can I quote at length from an unpublished peice of research I find
interesting?  

Sorry it's so long.

...

"In addition to the evidence that definitions of deviance vary by sex
roles, there has been some evidence which indicates that patterns of
societal reaction differ qualititatively.  ...  Holding constant the
alleged crime, there is evidence for a 'paternalistic pattern' of
discrimination when examining female defendents.  The paternalistic
pattern 'involves unfavoriable treatment with regard to such 
safeguards for the innocent as having an attorney or having a jury
trial.  It involves favorable treatment, however, with regard to being
kept out of jail pending trial, not being convicted, and not being
sentenced to jail if convicted." (Nagal and Wietzman, 1979).  This
hypothesis is supported by the American Bar Foundation data.

"The paternalistic pattern can be regarded as more *informal* pattern
of social control...  Hagan et al. (1979) argue that characterization
of the social control of female offenders as informal in comparison
to the social control of males is theoretically sound ...

"[Hagan et al.] begin by noting that social stratification implies that
limits are imposed on some groups' access to 'the rewards... distributed
in the system' (eg. prestige and income.)  In the present case, we
note that women's access to rewards is restricted through their
assgnment to the private sphere, whereas men are deployed in the
public sphere were the rewards are distributed.  'It is of special
insterest to us that one consequence of the restriction of women to
private space is to make them less available for public ascription
of criminal and deliquent statuses.'

"Tracing sexual stratification to the historical removal of men's work
from the home, they argue that the activities of social control
(surveillance, supervision and sanctioning) 'have shiften increasingly
in their locus of organization from family and kinship groups to the
state.  In brief, the new form of work brought a new form of social
control, now called crime control."  Because women remained in the home
sphere as men moved into public places of work, the development of crime
control 'had much more to do with the legal control of men than women...
The result was to subject men incrasingly to the formal social
control of an emerging criminal justic system, while leaving women to
the informal social control of the family.'

"A primary contention is 'that the question of differential treatment
cannot be answered effectively without a simultaneous consideration of
both the formal *and* informal structures of social control, and their
linkages into the gender-based stratification system.'

"In light of this argument, we can postulate that the 'preferential'
treatment of women which is so often reported in the research of social
control agencies can be interpreted as a lack of acknowledgement of
female deviance in the public sphere."  

[evidence on how females were more often turned in to juvenile court by
parents while boys were arrested; girls are more often arrested for
status offenses (underage drinking, curfew violation, running away) 
than boys] 

"Another interesting pheonomenon cited by the research literature is the
tendency to 'misclassify' the offenses of girls.  Chesney-Lind cites
several cases of this:  one girl she interviewed was initially brought
in for car theft and was subsequently charged with running away.... 
This evidence may indicate that girls' offenses in the public sphere
are often seen as evidence of some dysfunction in the private realm
governed by the family.

"The differential treatment of women offenders does not appear to be 
simply an issue of 'better or worse' treatment compared to men's. ...
It seems that women are sanctioned more severely for some offenses,
and men for others."

rini