ABSTRACT
Home Office figures published in 2004 suggest that men are responsible for 80 per cent of crime – indeed one-third of men will have a conviction by their thirtieth birthday (and that does not include motoring offences). Historically, too, men have been arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned in far greater numbers than women. While the numbers of women caught up in the criminal justice system are far smaller than those of men (although female prison numbers were still rising sharply at the end of the twentieth century), this is not a universal ‘law’, and the proportions of female and male offenders, and proportions of juvenile and adult offenders, are not somehow ‘fixed’. For example, during the nineteenth century indictments against women fell from 27 per cent of all cases in 1857 to 19 per cent in 1890 while prosecutions for minor offences were around 20 per cent (Emsley 2005: 93-4, also see Zedner 1991: 36). There was also a trend during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries that reduced the proportion of offending women even further by diverting them away from the criminal justice system and placing them in semi-carceral institutions such as inebriates reformatories, and asylums (Barton 2005; Morrison 2005). Juvenile crime statistics were moving in the opposite direction, as changes in the criminal justice system brought more and more children before the courts during the nineteenth century.
