This paper argues that the penalties imposed on female defendants convicted of a crime should differ from those given to male defendants convicted of the same crimes. Women represent a very small proportion of the criminal population in America. Their gender has, historically, tended to give them different treatment from that of the men undergoing the same system of justice. Most often, women have been treated more leniently, although some aspects of automatic justice, particularly the mandatory sentencing system, have worked against them. This paper argues that women should be continue to be given different penalties from men because their relationship to the judicial system and to society as a whole is different from that of men, though not for all of the same reasons that have dictated past discrepancies. The three primary reasons that women should be sentenced differently are because existing sentences derive from the bias of the white male view of the world and male-centered motivations for committing crimes, that a significant number of female criminals are also mothers with primary responsibility for their children, and that judges and juries exist to evaluate individual circumstances, not to dispense arbitrary justice in the name of social equality.
Women are such a relative rarity as perpetrators of crime that the word "criminal" is often considered to be an exclusively male label. Few crime statistics bother to separate out female criminals, preferring to focus on larger issues, such as the number of juveniles or the proportion of African Americans who have been arrested and convicted of crimes. However, women represent a distinct population among criminals, and, as such, they should be given separate consideration when being sentenced for their misdeeds.
America's culture of crime and violence is unique. Founded on frontier principles, crime in America has always been viewed as both a definition of the natio...