Research on gender differences in criminal sanctions generally finds a pattern of more lenient outcomes for female offenders, while noting that the effect of gender varies in relation to a number of contextual influences. As yet, however, little attention has been paid to how the relationship of gender to court outcomes varies across different historical periods. This paper examines this issue, using data on male and female offenders committed to Middlesex County Jail, Ontario, during the Urban Reform Era (1871–1920). The findings reveal an overall pattern of more severe dispositions for female offenders in the past. At the same time, there is considerable variability in the impact of gender across different measures of sanction severity, various offender and offense attributes, and from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The study highlights the need for research in this area to be sensitive to the historically specific nature of the relations among gender roles, formal and informal control mechanisms, and criminal sanctions.
A great deal of attention has been focused on the nature and extent of contemporary gender differences in criminality and, especially, recent increases in female crime rates. The failure to examine the relation among gender roles, social control mechanisms, and crime rates within a broad historical context, however, has contributed to several shortcomings and misconceptions in current research and theorizing. Results of a time‐series analysis of male and female arrests in Toronto from 1859 to 1955 reveal an overall decline in male and female rates, as well as an overriding similarity in long‐term patterns of male and female arrest rates for different categories of offenses In particular, the preponderance of public order arrests for males and females strongly confirms the enduring relation between social class and official criminality, regardless of gender. To explain the long‐term reduction in female arrest rates, qualitative data are used to illustrate the historically contingent relation between gender roles and changes in formal and informal structures of social control. The findings point to the prominent role of “Yrst‐wave feminists” in changing the forms of both formal and informal controls on women, which contributed to a sharp decline in female arrest rates during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Recent historical scholarship has stressed the importance of dominant political and economic interest groups in shaping the organization and role of nineteenth-century police institutions. While acknowledging the necessity of developing macro-structural interpretations of police development, this paper argues that a comprehensive understanding of policing requires greater attention to organizational concerns with legitimation, self-maintenance and self-determination as intervening variables in the evolution of urban police forces. Using data on policing in nineteenth-century Toronto, emphasis is placed on delineating the process by which police administrators sought to achieve insulation from external sources of control and to act as independent agents of change and innovation in the structure and functions of policing.
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