ABSTRACT
Few features of criminal justice in the United States are more striking than the pronounced disparities in imprisonment between men and women. Whereas men make up slightly less than one-half of the general population of the United States, they make up nearly 95 percent of the prison inmates in the country. Much of the current writing on disparities in criminal punishment looks to differences in the legal system's treatment of men and women offenders. Almost all of the empirical research published in recent years on sex differences in punishment has focused on the differential treatment of individual criminal defendants processed within a single jurisdiction or court. Typically, societies use formal mechanisms of control such as the administration of criminal justice only when other control mechanisms fail. Sex differences in imprisonment, particularly the low rates of imprisonment of women, may in part stem from pronounced sex differences in institutionalization in mental hospitals.
