[Base] [Index]
In Article <1995May23.202800.1461@schbbs.mot.com> bhv@areaplg2.corp.mot.com (Bronis Vidugiris) writes: In article <3pq7cm$qqh@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>, Carol Ann Hemingway wrote: ) )I agree in part, disagree in part. I too believe that men and women )should receive equality in sentencing. I'm not sure about the )statistics, but from what I'v heard, women receive longer sentencing )than do men in most murder cases.

What one finds, though, is that (at least as of 1986, the latest data could find even though it's nigh 10 years old now) women are under-represented in prison for violent crimes, including murder.

This is non-Farrel data, BTW.

There may be many ways to interpret this - my take on this is that women are convincted only when there is pretty clear evidence of premeditation. So they tend to get a large sentence when they are convicted (hence your data), but they are still underrepresented in prison. (Others may interpret the data differently - murder is particularly tricky issue, I think that looking at the broader picture helps as I mention again later).

The issue is not ultimately one of sentencing - there is some discrimination in sentencing, but the data I've seen on the topic suggests that it's fairly minor compared to less conroled differences based on how the power of the prosecutor is applied.

here's the data:

How does our justice system treat men as compared with women? Here is some dataon the topic. It's slightly out of date (1986) - the main problem was getting more current figures for the prison composition data. (Unfortunately, this has been changing, so the out-of-dateness could well change the figures.)

The data reports the criminal population (only for single-offender crimes, alas) as reported by the victims in the National Crime Survey. It also reports the prison composition by gender for each crime category for comparison. Murder data for perps is from the Uniform Crime Reports as the NCS doesn't collect this data (the difficulty in getting interviews from dead victims is one reason :-)). The NCS data is from the year 1988.

Perps (NCS data) Prison Composition Crime Male Female Unknown Male Female

Rape 95.0 1.7 3.3 99.8 .3 Simple Assault 83.9 15.7 .4 Aggravated Assault 87.2 12.1 .6 96.2 3.8 Robbery 87.0 11.1 1.9 97.8 2.3 Murder* 85.8 13.5 .6 95.0 5.1

*UCR data

The conclusion which follows is that women are underrepresented in prison for a broad spectrum of violent crimes, including murder.

Murder is a particularly tricky issue. It's hard to tell how much to trust police reports. I think that the bias of the justice system as a whole is best addressed by looking at other crimes where data by the victim is available (as I did above) and assuming similar biases apply to murder.