Versatile Offending: Criminal Careers of Female Prisoners in Australia, 1860–1920

Abstract

The use of longitudinal data from the criminal records of a sample of 6,042 female prisoners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria reveals limitations in the traditional method of examining criminality within specific offense categories. Investigations devoted exclusively to particular categories of women’s offenses potentially obscures the extent to which women resorted to multiple forms of offending. Such versatile activity challenges conceptions of women as predominantly petty offenders by suggesting that some women were arrested for minor offenses because of their engagement in more serious crimes and their participation in criminal sub-cultures.

Imprisonment of Female Urban and Rural Offenders in Victoria, 1860-1920

“…Women charged with more serious offences would generally be committed to the General Sessions or Circuit Court Sessions located closest to where their crime took place, but this could be some distance if they were living remotely to any of the major centres. However, the vast bulk of female offending was heard by the more proximate Petty Sessions, with more than 80% of female prisoners only ever tried in this jurisdiction over the course of their criminal careers(Piper and Nagy 2017); this mirrors contemporary findings about women's offending and their appearances in Magistrates' courts on minor charges.…”

“…Overall, the offence profiles of female prisoners in Victoria between 1860 and 1920 were similar to results from other research in Australia and abroad for roughly the same period (Allen 1990;Zedner 1991). The bulk of female offending was weighted towards minor public order offences such as vagrancy and disorderly conduct, while theft offences greatly predominated over violent crimes when it came to more serious criminal activity (Piper and Nagy 2017). This pattern is broadly evident across women imprisoned by both urban and rural courts.…”

“…Over the course of one's criminal careers, a significant proportion of female offenders would commit different types of offences (Piper and Nagy 2017). Overall, the majority of women's offending, considering all convictions, still comprised of public order offences, followed by theft offences, then violent and other types of crimes (Table 2).…”

‘Us Girls Won’t Put One Another Away’: relations among Melbourne’s prostitute pickpockets, 1860–1920

“…Women convicted of larceny from the person showed similar trends. 21 The association between prostitution and pickpocketing was well-known to contemporaries, particularly when it came to well-known Melbourne vice districts such as Romeo Lane or 'Bilking' Square, sonamed because of the high number of men 'bilked' of their money there. 22 The trade remained fairly centralised even during the 1890s as police dispersed this prostitution traffic from the city centre into the neighbouring suburbs of Carlton and Fitzroy, but became more fragmented at the end of the war as crackdowns pushed prostitution further afield.…”