Incarcerated girls have disproportionately higher rates of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse compared with their nonincarcerated peers. Failure to address this trauma and abuse can lead to mental health disabilities such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anti-social behaviors. Many girls who experience trauma engage…

Purpose: Incarcerated women serving life sentences are a growing subpopulation with multiple mental health needs. However, no existing interventions have been designed for or tested with this population. Method: This study tested a gender-responsive, trauma-informed intervention ("Beyond Violence") and examined changes in incarcerated…

Statistical reports confirm that the female incarcerated population is not only increasing, but the frequency of mental disorders among this vulnerable population is accelerating. Women's pathways to crime show that gender matters significantly in shaping criminality. The frequency of mental disorders among incarcerated females is much higher than…

Background: Women with intellectual/developmental disabilities in conflict with the law experience childhood trauma, substance abuse and intimate partner violence but continue to have difficulty accessing appropriate therapeutic services, both within correctional settings and upon discharge. The aim of this study is to explore women's service…

The School-to-Prison Pipeline is an alarming trend of funneling children of color out of schools and into incarceration. Yet the focus on the Pipeline neglects the ways society is imbued with a commitment to criminalizing unwanted bodies. In this empirical article I foreground a spatial analysis, making connections to the socio-spatial dialectic,…

Through our reading of the memoirs of women political prisoners in Morocco, Iraq, and Iran, this article explores the transnational feminist praxis of building solidarity. We cross-read these memoirs in the context of Aboriginal women's encounter with state violence in Canada. This cross-reading and contemplation are intended to trouble the…

Definitions vary on what constitutes sexual and/or physical abuse, and scholars have debated on which methods might yield the most accurate response rates for capturing this sensitive information. Although some studies suggest respondents prefer methods that provide anonymity, previous studies have not utilized high-risk or stigmatized…

More than a decade after the US-led intervention of Afghanistan, traditional and tribal customs still play a significant role in the everyday lives of people, especially women. History has proven that women have been playing a significant role in shaping the course of Afghanistan but unfortunately, they are always subjected to different degrees of…

Despite general consensus over the value of measuring self-reported offending, discrepancies exist in methods of scoring self-reported offending and the length of the reference period over which offending is assessed. This analysis compared the concurrent interassociations and longitudinal predictive strength of diversity, frequency, and severity…

A comparison of the characteristics of 337 Canadian adult female gang offenders with a matched sample of women offenders showed that they were more likely to have been sentenced for violent offenses, had a greater number of prior youth and criminal convictions, and served prior terms of incarceration. Gang members were also assessed as having…

The present study utilizes a pre- and post-test design to examine the effectiveness of an Impact of Crime on Victims Class (ICVC) on decreasing an offender's propensity to externalize responsibility for their behavior and its subsequent impact on an offender's level of victim- and society-blaming. The multiple analysis of covariance (MANCOVA)…

Policy makers and juvenile justice officials express alarm over the rise in arrests of girls for simple and aggravated assault. Others see this perceived increase as an artifact of decreased public tolerance for violence, changes in parental attitudes or law enforcement policies, or heightened surveillance of domestic violence, which…

Juvenile crime and violent victimization continue to be significant social problems, in that adolescents, females in particular, are likely to participate in health-related risk behaviors as a result of having been victimized or exposed to a violent environment. Specifically, abuse, neglect, sexual molestation, poverty, and witnessing violence are…

Research indicates that female offenders are far more likely to have experienced intimate partner violence than women in the general population. Despite extensive research on women's pathways into offending, very little is known about why these women are at increased risk for partner violence. The authors use data from a sample of incarcerated…

In the early 19th century, the famous Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville spent a considerable amount of time touring America and writing about what he saw. He is, of course, most famous for his book Democracy in America (1961), but he also wrote, along with a fellow Frenchman Gustav de Beaumont, a book called On the Penitentiary System in the United…