Smart, Carol: Women, Crime, and Criminology

Alana Van Gundy-Yoder

Carol Smart's book Women, Crime and Criminology focuses on female offenders and criminality. Smart summarizes the nature of female criminality, presents classical and contemporary studies of female criminality, and provides a feminist critique of prostitution/rape, the treatment of female offenders, and the myths surrounding female offenders and mental illness. Smart postulates that criminology conceals women in the same manner that they are concealed in other aspects of life. She argues that as a direct result of the low status of women in society, academics, criminologists, and policy makers evidence disinterest in female criminality. Circumstances that contribute to this disinterest include the statistical bias of criminal reporting (e.g., there are sex-specific offenses—categorization and legal definitions such as prostitution and infanticide only define it as a crime for one particular sex—and sex-related offenses can be committed by either sex but are predominately committed by a particular sex), and problems in statistical analysis. ...

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