I was having a conversation with someone not too long ago about the “female sentencing discount”, and I realized that I didn’t personally have a whole lot of evidence on hand with which to back it up. I have some anecdotes, of course, but those are flimsy evidence because weird things happen in life. I kind of take it for granted that there is a female sentencing discount, because it seems to make intuitive sense based on how gender is often treated in other areas of life. But sometimes intuition is wrong, and I’d like to make sure there is actually compelling evidence for it before I spout off about it again.
So I’d like to start a thread to pull together evidence (counter-evidence is also welcome) of the female sentencing discount. I’m especially interested in studies and research that are not based in anecdote, but instead are based on proper (or as close to proper as we can get) random sampling and survey. Moreover, it would be especially helpful to find research or studies that look at sentencing disparities for similar crimes. Also, arrest rates for similar situations, etc.
I’m bringing this up as a thread partly because I’m lazy/busy, but also because I suspect a lot of people here already know where to look for these things, whereas I’m a bit in the dark. Also, I’m creating a new post category, “Evidence Collection”, so that people can easily find and reference these kinds of threads in the future.
Thanks in advance to anyone that chooses to help out!
- Prison Rape Statistics - January 27, 2013
- Seattle One Night Count - January 25, 2013
- Newtown Shooting, and the Nature of Risk - December 25, 2012
by 
http://ncfm.org/2011/04/issues/criminal-sentencing/ has a link to what seems to be a detailed study of ~77K federal offenders.
http://www.terry.uga.edu/~mustard/sentencing
I think this blog has many of those kind of infos and links:
http://feck-blog.blogspot.ca/
Thanks guys! Keep ’em coming.
On Feckblog (thanks Schala!) I found this:
http://feck-blog.blogspot.ca/2012/06/sentencing-sex-offenders-edition.html
Which links to this study:
Sex-Based Sentencing: Sentencing Discrepancies Between Male and Female Sex Offenders – Randa Embry and Phillip M. Lyons, Jr. – Feminist Criminology – 2012 7: 146
One from the British Home Office: Understanding the Sentencing of Women
Another good one from feckblog:
http://feck-blog.blogspot.ca/2009/01/justice-is-blind.html
It contains a fair bit of anecdote at the beginning, which I’m inclined to disregard (strange things happen, and you can always find disparate treatment if you get to choose which cases you’re comparing), but it cites some actual studies further into the post.
I always am thrilled when people link to my blog. I fear though I am not as transparent as I could be when it comes to tagging. You will find everything I have blogged about this topic via the tag “Justice” (http://feck-blog.blogspot.de/search/label/Justice).
Posts that are also very relevant here:
http://feck-blog.blogspot.de/2012/03/do-you-receive-lighter-prison-sentence.html
http://feck-blog.blogspot.de/2012/04/some-studies-about-sentencing.html
Thanks so much Feckless!
Good idea for a thread. I will never forget reading research from my state of Maryland where the researchers had gone into detail about the racial factors involved in sentencing showing that blacks received longer sentences for the same crime as whites. I found the raw data and looked for a breakdown by sex, found it and saw that the disparity was greater for sex discrimination than for racial discrimination. I wrote to the researchers who agreed with me about the raw data but made no excuses for overlooking this and for focusing only on race.
This is a good example of what we face. There is simply very little interest in showing that men are at risk or that men are facing hardship and discrimination. Farrell nailed it years ago, men are seen as disposable and that default judgement prevents them as ever being seen as victims.
Here are some I have tripped across. Some of these may be repeats of studies others have posted:
http://www.courts.wa.gov/committee/pdf/2008LFO_report.pdf
A Univ of Wash study of crimes in which only financial penatlies were assessed (fines restitution) men were treated much harsher
http://www.terry.uga.edu/~mustard/sentencing.pdf
This study for the USA shows the discrimination suffered by men in sentencing is about equal to the discrimination suffered by blacks
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1311004/Judges-ordered-mercy-women-criminals-deciding-sentences.html
This article states judges in the UK are being trained to give female defendants lighter sentences. This outrage on top of:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/digest4/chapter5.pdf
This study shows that in the UK boys & men ALREADY receive much harsher sentences than do women.
Also, a great research tool is the search bar at fathers and families. The many blog posts of glenn sacks were copied over and he has been posting about male/female inequities for the last 14 years or so.
@Hackberry:
Can you provide links to those sources?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183526/Kristle-Vandever-Teacher-44-escapes-prison-despite-boasting-sex-students.html
The page speaks for itself. Reverse the genders and the teacher might have been killed prior to the trial.
@Xakudo – I am looking for them. The email that was exchanged with the researchers is long gone to a dead hard drive years ago. I am hoping to be able to find the study and when I do I will post a link.
I was poking around looking for that study and bumped into this:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/208129.pdf
Here’s a short quote from the article:
“The existing research indicates that, at the individual-level, offender characteristics have important relationships with sentencing outcomes. Specifically, age and sex of defendant have been found in some research to be important predictors of sentence severity. For instance, while the research is clearly not uniform in this regard, several studies have found women receive more lenient sanctions than men (Bernstein 1979; Daly and Tonry 1997; Frazier and Bock 1982; Steffensmeier 1980; Mustard 2001). Similarly, research by Steffensmeier et al. (1998), Spohn and Holleran (2000), Zatz and Hagan (1985) among many others, have found sentence severity is related to age of defendant. Such findings suggest that these characteristics are potentially important moderator variables; that is, differences between studies on proportion of females in the sample and mean age of sample may contribute to differences in results. Therefore, we coded these factors from each sample in order to capture between study differences on these offender characteristics.”
Interesting idea that the other studies on racial bias in sentencing may be biased themselves due to the sample having more women! LOL
Thanks Hackberry!
@MaMu1977:
Good find. But as I said in the OP, I’m looking for hard data, not anecdote. Given the huge size of the human population, flukes happen all the time, and you can usually find quite a few of anything if you look hard enough. So it’s good to back up those anecdotes with hard data.
Does anybody have any evidence of abuse resistance against men entering nursing or other caring/female dominated fields?
This is another conversation ender that I get hungup on all the time when I am arguing with feminists.