[Voices from Within: Women Who Have Broken the Law]

Abstract

Until recently, relatively little has been written about incarcerated females in Canada. Traditionally, criminological theory has evolved through research of male criminal behaviour. Subsequently, when talking about female criminogenic factors, theorists attempted to transfer theory and treatment of male offenders to the female offender population. Prison programming has typically attempted the same extrapolation. In more recent years, both feminist criminologists and others involved with female offenders have highlighted the need to rethink our understanding of the antecedents of female criminality and acknowledge the ways in which female offenders differ from their male counterparts. Recent literature has pointed to the social circumstances of women (such as violence against women, institutionalized sexist practices and poverty) as influential in bringing some women into conflict with the law. This research has been invaluable in informing a more accurate understanding of the unique circumstances of female offenders. However, given the practice of examining a woman's external environment as a significant factor in female criminal behaviour, many theorists have neglected the psychological and emotional factors that influence the lives of women who commit crimes. Similarly, over the past decade and a half, feminist writers and mental health professionals have produced much research on women's psychology. Rarely, though, does this research incorporate the lives of female offenders. Evelyn K. Sommer's book, Voices from Within: Women Who have Broken the Law, brings the two together. Using the work of feminist psychologists at The Stone Center, Sommers interprets interviews of females through a specifically women-centred lens. Sommers interviewed 14 women, most of whom differ in race, age, criminal offence and family history. The discussion of these interviews are informative and innovative as Sommer's approach to the interview analysis is one that begins with the "woman's understanding of what happened to them." In part, Sommer writes, this approach emerged from her work as a counsellor in a women's prison, where she came to see the shortcomings of theoretical explanations of female criminal behaviour. Sommers interprets the content of the interviews against the backdrop of a psychological theory of woman's development, called the "relational theory," developed by feminist psychologists at The Stone Center. A central tenet of this theory is that, contrary to traditional theories of personality development which emphasize individuation and separation as the goal of psychological maturity, for many women "mutually empowering relationships, or relationships that are mutually growth-fostering, are both the medium through which development occurs and the goal of development." Overall, Sommers found that the women she interviewed were denied "mutually empowering relationships" as children and thus did not develop a sense of their own effectiveness or power in the world. The women in this study, therefore, made decisions about their actions, rooted in an attempt to feel some agency over their lives and connection to others. One of the most salient examples is in Sommers analysis of drug addicted women. The women in this category began using drugs at an early age, in an attempt to dissociate themselves from feelings of isolation, pain and self-hatred resulting from abuse or neglect in their family. …