PSYC 3402: Female Offenders

Contents

1. 1. Historical Overview
   1. 1.1 Current Research (Ways to Research Females)
2. 2. Classification and Risk Assessment
3. 3. Approaches to Treatment and Management

This post contains information from the book and Dena Derkzen’s lecture.

For more information on what she was talking about, go to CSC’s Women Offender Programs and Issues.

1. Historical Overview

Context:

• Lombroso: his first account of female criminality was sexist and focused heavily on biology and sexuality;
• Future researchers proposed theories that were:
  • Still sexist and focused too much on female sexuality, biology and psychology; and
  • Either explicitly excluded female offenders or implicitly assumed through omission that their theories would generalize to females.
• Currently (since 1975), there has been a surge in research focusing on female offenders attempting to look at female criminality through the perspective of feminism.

Prevalence and Nature of Female-Perpetrated Crime:

• Universal Fact: females commit substantially less crime and in particular, less violent and serious crimes (as compared to males).
• Females are more likely to kill an intimate partner or family member
  • Motivations:
    • When females commit non-familial homicide, their motivations tend to mirror those of males: vindication and/or attempt to restore personal integrity.
    • When females commit familial homicide, they tend to do so in response to domestic violence whereas males appear to be acting out of jealousy, infidelity, desertion and control.
• Females commit property crimes at a rate comparable to males (not as high but close) but their reason for doing so tends to be out of necessity (ex: feed and clothe children) rather than for adventure and status enhancement (as it is with males).

1.1 Current Research (Ways to Research Females)

Qualitative research is where we use words (ex: interview techniques) versus quantitative research, where we use data (ex: statistics). Keep in mind that we should be using both techniques.

1. Feminist Pathways Research: where one-time qualitative interview techniques with incarcerated females or self-identified prostitutes to ascertain pathways to delinquency.
   • Research suggests that aversive family environments push females into the streets where they get involved in prostitution and other coping strategies (ex: drug trafficking, robbery, fraud).
   • Criticisms: doesn’t separate girls from women; primarily researched on American samples and used qualitative techniques; lack of male comparison group; uni-dimensional pathway (criminalized survivor).
2. Integrated Liberation and Economic Marginalization Theory: the women’s liberation movement has perpetuated the belief that females are better off financially (they’re not) and divorce has increased the number of single-headed families; expectations of wealth and status also encourage female to adopt illegitimate means of achieve wealth and power.
   • Research supports the components of this theory but…
   • Criticisms: it doesn’t explain how other individual factors factor in; why don’t all divorced mothers living in poverty resort to crime?; doesn’t identify protective factors that could be used in intervention strategies.
3. PIC-R Theory (Personal, Interpersonal and Community-Reinforcement): read Chapter 3 (in summary, gender is not central to the model).

2. Classification and Risk Assessment

1. Gender-Neutral Risk-Assessment Instruments: instruments that were designed based on research with predominantly male offenders, based on gender-neutral theories of crime but are used with female offenders. Critics say that these instruments tend to be biased because ‘gender-neutral’ often means ‘male’; defenders argue that they happen to work well with both sexes.
   • Meta-analytic research conducted on the LS/CMI (Level of Service/Case Management Inventory) and the YLS/CMI (youth version) suggests that:
     • There hasn’t been much research done on female offenders, and particularly not youths.
     • The average effect size (of predictive validity) was comparable to men (meaning, yes, we can use these instruments with female offenders).
   • Criticisms:
     • Instruments like the LSI-R and the LS/CMI fail to take into account the gendered pathway to crime into account; research confirms that out of three groups (unclassifiable, economically-motivated/male-typical and gender pathway), the LSI-R predicted recidivism for all but the gender pathway group.
     • These instruments also don’t take into account that females tend to have a lower threshold for the impacts of family dysfunction and a higher threshold against the influence of antisocial associates. Furthermore, marriage tends to be protective for men but a risk factor for women.
2. Gender-Informed Risk Instrument: there are currently two types of these instruments developed by Canadians: the YASI-G – Youth Assessment Screen Inventory for Girls; and SPIN – Service Planning Inventory for Women. No indication of predictive validity yet.
   
   The SRSW (Security Reclassification Scale for Women) tends to under-classify women as compared to clinical judgments. Predictive validity was moderately high (0.75)

3. Approaches to Treatment and Management

Correctional Service of Canada: CSC is responsible for administering sentences of a term of two years or more. They provide recommendations, perform risk assessments of offenders; supervising community offenders; etc.

• Legislation – Corrections and Conditional Release Act (1992): here are the major principles they subscribe to…
  • Protection of society
  • Least restrictive measures (to protect society, staff, offenders)
  • Offenders retain rights and privileges (except those that are removed as a consequence of their sentence)
  • Respect ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences and be responsive to the special needs of women and Aboriginal people

Creating Choices: in response to the lack of gender-responsive programs available to women, CSC has identified 5 key principles: empowerment, responsible choices, respect and dignity, supportive environment and shared responsibility. Intervention programs are supposed to be designed to meet the following concepts: a women-centered, holistic approach, with integration between institution and community, a continuum of care, an individual approach and creativity and flexibility.

• CSC has also identified certain factors (non-criminogenic) that are especially salient for females. This includes childcare services, parenting programs, female-only group programs, trauma programming, substance abuse treatment, etc.
• Researchers advocate that treatment programs must address many needs at once and occur in an environment that fosters respect and understanding (from staff and others). However, there is little research examining the effectiveness (of reducing redicivism) when non-criminogenic needs are targeted, but the research we do have is promising (suggesting that pairing substance abuse programs with prenatal care, mental health care and gender-specific programming is most effective).
  Read more on the CSC web site, Principles and Concepts in Women’s Correction.
• Responsivity: research suggests that adhering to responsivity, need and risk principles reduced recidivism at rates comparable to men (20-30% range). Be cautious with these results though because the meta-analytic studies were done on small samples and predominantly with youth offenders (they may not generalize to adult female offenders).

Community Reintegration Study: examined 600 federally sentenced women in the community, which is relatively small but because they are geographically dispersed it presents a challenge to offer services and reporting to parole officer (schedules need to be flexible).

Results:

• Women get more day parole than men;
• 80% of revocations don’t involve a new offence (most revocations occur within the first 3 months of release)
• Within the first two years of release, only 5% return with a new violent offence.
• CSC has designed the Social Integration Program – designed to provide better support for women during the critical period of community reintegration; mental health services too (designed for women with high mental health needs).

Criticisms of the Gender-Neutral Correctional Treatment Model (Responsivity Model):

• Targets individual change but ignores a woman’s ecology, both immediate (family, friends, partner) and distal (societal, political, economical).
• RNR is based on quantitative meta-analytic studies that don’t include the small-scale or qualitative studies.