CARLEN- FEMINIST
Cards (7)
- Carlen
- conducted a study from a feminist perspective on female offenders
- Her study focused on a group of mostly working-class women aged 15 to 46.
- All participants had been convicted of one or more crimes.
- Carlen used in-depth, unstructured interviews for data collection.
- Some of the women interviewed were in prison or youth custody during the study.
- Carlen's approach is based on control theory.
- The theory assumes that humans are neither inherently good nor bad.
- People make rational decisions to commit crimes when they perceive the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages.
- Her view
- Carlen argues that working-class women are controlled by the promise of rewards
- They enter a class deal: respectable working-class women receive consumer goods in exchange for their wages
- They have to maintain employment and stay within societal expectations of respectable behaviour
- They also enter a gender deal: women receive psychological and material rewards from male breadwinners in return for love and domestic labor (gender roles)
- Examples; love, financial stability, or a sense of belonging
- UNAVAILBLE REWARDS
- When promised rewards are unavailable or seem illusory, criminality can become a viable alternative.
- Carlen’s study, though based on a small sample (39 women), supports this view.
- Findings suggest that criminal behavior is more likely when social control mechanisms break down
- THEREFORE provides support for the control theory
- When deals" fail or when the rewards don’t materialize e.g when a woman is unemployed, underpaid, or abandoned by a partner CRIME is committed
- Criticism of sample
- small sample
- sample may be unrepresentative of all crimes committed by women
- Strength of her research method
- Unstructured interviews
- Flexible
- Carlen could have tailored the questions to each women to produce in depth and detailed data
- Weakness of her research method
- Hard to analyse
- Data cannot be compared as all the questions differ