Unit 13

Ex I. Scan through the text. Work in pairs to answer the questions that follow.

Male criminality and female criminality. Knowledge of the types of people who commit crimes is generally based on studies of those who have been detected, prosecuted, and convicted. A first aspect of criminality is that crime is predominantly a male activity. In all criminal populations men outnumber women by a high proportion. In Britain in 1984, for instance, of 449,000 offenders found guilty of criminal offenses, 387,400 (86 percent) were males; in the same year, the average population of the prisons consisted of 41,822 men and 1,473 women. In most Western societies the incidence (the number of times something bad happens) of recorded crime by women, and the number of women passing through the penal systems, is on the increase; in the United States, for instance, the number of women arrested for property crimes between 1960 and 1976 increased by 276 percent—a significantly higher rate of increase than that exhibited by other groups. A similar trend is shown in English prison statistics: the number of women in prison rose from 538 in 1974 to 941 in 1984, an increase of 75 percent in 10 years. A number of explanations have been offered for this trend. One suggestion is that it reflects a real trend in the commission of crimes by women—that the changing social role of women, with more women leaving the home and taking employment, expecting and achieving financial independence, leads to greater opportunity for crime and to greater temptation. An alternative explanation is that the change in the rate of female criminality merely reflects a change in the operation of the criminal justice system—that crimes committed by women are less likely than was previously the case to be ignored by law enforcement agencies out of a sense of chivalry. Even though female criminality appears to be increasing faster than male criminality, it will be many years before women reach the same level of crime as men.