At the same time it was consistent with the degrading and disrespectful treatment they had become used to. Richie points out that given the predictability of private life abuse versus the untrustable unpredictability of public space, and the fact that violent men are more likely to kill the woman they are abusing if she leave than if she stays, the women's choice to stay with the abusive companions was in some respects logical. Richie's gender entrapment model is drawn from open-ended life history interviews with 26 battered Black women at the Rose M. Singer Center at Rikers Island Correctional Facility. Richie also spoke with six Black women who were not battered, and five white women who were, as a way to highlight and pinpoint the different forces of entrapment that African American women abused by their intimates face. The use of the reference groups deepens Richie's works by providing a good look at the circumstances non-battered Black and battered white women face as well.
Women continue to be trapped in abusive relationships, locked in bedrooms and cells.
Richie's honest look at why they're there is very welcome. Search and Destroy and Compelled to Crime illustrate the narrative possibilities of criminological research. What they do is a true criminology , concerned with where crime comes from and what it is, as opposed to penology, looking for better and more effective ways to make people do what they are told. The differences between these two standpoints are represented on one hand by a reliance on crudely manipulated statistics, telling the white middle class through their media that their prejudices are justified, and on the other a narrative, almost literary sociology, in which lives are described and the individuality of each case is taken as a given. The power of narrative criminology is that it is much harder to torment someone with a face.