NCJ Number
187335
Date Published
2000
Length
50 pages
Annotation
These 10 articles by practitioners and researchers focus on women offenders and community-based corrections, with emphasis on effective responses to female offenders in the community and on innovative and promising efforts in policy and program development.
Abstract
The discussions cover traditional probation and parole, as well as the whole system of decision making processes and choices of pretrial and post-adjudication options at the local level. Individual papers consider how community corrections agencies may come to understand why they should respond to women differently than men and why gender matters in criminal justice system involvement. Additional articles present researcher and practitioner perspectives regarding guiding principles for developing gender-responsive programs and describe partnerships across criminal justice and treatment systems to respond to the needs of female offenders in Arizona, Maryland, and Minnesota. Other papers explain the central role of residential programming for female offenders and their children and examine the challenges of improving women’s ability to succeed in the community, given the changes in public policy in the last decade. Further papers discuss efforts in Hamilton County (OH) and Cook County (IL) that, with technical assistance from the National Institute of Corrections, established task forces or systemwide policy teams to undertake a long-term process of policy development to improve decision making about female offenders and women’s programs. Themes common to the articles include the distinct criminal pathways of women, including their histories of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and drug abuse, and their current profiles and life circumstances, including their high rates of mental illness and drug abuse, concern for their children, and economic marginality. Another common theme in the articles is the reality that female offenders receive services from multiple human service systems. Table and chapter reference lists