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40 Chapter 2 Introducing the Women and Their Pathways to Offending Although there is considerable diversity in the experiences of women in this study, in important ways they represent those who are most affected by incarceration today. Like male prisoners, female prisoners are disproportionately poor,African American, and from disadvantaged urban communities (Richie 2001).A majority of female prisoners have children, and they often are stigmatized not only because of their offending and incarceration histories but also for being“bad women”and“bad mothers”(Flavin 2001; Greenfield and Snell 1999; Owen 1998). Female prisoners have high rates of drug use and drug addiction, and women have been particularly hard hit by the War on Drugs (Chesney-Lind 2002). They also tend to have even more limited work histories than male prisoners (Greenfield and Snell 1999).All of these trends were prevalent among the women in this study.This chapter provides a basic overview and description of the women who formed the core of the study, and the lives that led to their stay at the Mercy Home. The pathways perspective argues that gender matters significantly in shaping criminality and that women’s criminality is often based on survival of abuse, poverty, and substance abuse (Bloom, Owen, and Covington 2004; ChesneyLind 1997; S. Covington 2003; Owen 1998; Richie 2001).In addition, women’s incarceration has been shaped by policies related to the War on Drugs, welfare reform, and public housing that disproportionately affect drug-using women (Bloom, Owen, and Covington 2004).There were two common pathways to offending among these women.Many experienced a childhood and early adulthood characterized by abuse and addiction. Histories of family dysfunction, substance use, criminal activity and incarceration, material disadvantage, abuse, and violence were all common in their childhoods and young adulthoods and were often closely connected to their own substance use and offending histories. Another common pathway was for the women’s offending to follow drug use that began casually but developed into addiction over time. Once the addiction Introducing the Women and Their Pathways to Offending 41 was entrenched, these women began engaging in criminal activity to support their drug use and to compensate for their increasing difficulty maintaining employment.These women typically came from less disadvantaged or traumatic backgrounds and were often still embedded in neighborhoods and friendship circles in which drugs were widespread and available. In a few cases, the women ’s incarceration was a result of an isolated incident rather than a lifestyle that included a pattern of substance use and criminal activity. Demographic Overview By virtue of making the choice to go to the Mercy Home,all of the women in this study demonstrated a commitment to “going straight” and changing the aspects of their lives that led to criminal justice system involvement. Most of the women were from the neighborhoods in Chicago with the greatest concentration of crime, incarceration, and prisoner reentry (La Vigne et al. 2003; Sampson and Loeffler 2010), though a few were from outside Chicago and/or from middle-class communities.Most were African American;a few were white or Latina.The women ranged in age from twenty-eight to fifty-seven years old. Most had children; just over half had children under the age of eighteen. Most of the women had extensive histories of criminal and criminal justice system involvement.About a third of the women had been incarcerated on drugrelated charges,three-quarters self-reported drug-related offenses,and almost all reported drug use.Many others were convicted of offenses like theft and forgery that they committed in support of a drug addiction.They had served an average of 40.5 months in prison across 2.5 sentences.Three women had never been incarcerated but had served time on probation, and a few had served lengthy sentences of ten or more years. Nearly two-thirds reported having spent time in a city or county jail five or more times (see appendix A for descriptive tables). Family “Dysfunction” Drug use, criminal activity, and violence were common in the households in which these women grew up. For example, nearly half of the women reported drug or excessive alcohol use among their family members, and about a third of the respondents reported physical and/or sexual abuse by family members while they were growing up. Most often, this was abuse by fathers or stepfathers, though occasionally by other (most often male) relatives. An additional 15 percent reported witnessing the abuse of their mother by their father or...

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