sometimes permanently, from their children.
The majority of women in prison are likely to need drug or alcohol treatment programs and have probably been victims themselves, usually of family violence and/or sexual abuse. Female inmates are less likely than men to need "high security" incarceration. They are less likely to riot or to form gangs; prison friendships often develop across ethnic and racial lines, unlike the situations in men's jails. Women awaiting execution are so rare that they generate front-page news as their execution dates approach. By contrast, most female criminals are convicted of much less violent crimes than are men; Suzanne Elizabeth Kender (1996) writes, "Of the urban killers identified by the Department of Justice in 1988, 90 percent were male" (Kender, 1996, p. 19).
Yet even when women commit the same crimes as men, their sentences are almost always different. Judges and juries have tended to give women lighter punishments for similar offenses, viewing them, in the words of Rose Giallombardo, writing in 1966, as "err
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