Doing Justice, Doing Gender

Women in Legal and Criminal Justice Occupations

Susan Ehrlich Martin, Nancy C. Jurik

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781412927215, 9781412927208
• eBook ISBN: 9781452236667
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Martin and Jurik provide a clear body of evidence illuminating the gendered nature of criminal justice occupations. Of the multitude of feminist works on this topic, this is one of the best analyses available."

—CRIMINAL JUSTICE REVIEW



Doing Justice, Doing Gender: Women in Legal and Criminal Justice Occupations is a highly readable, sociologically grounded analysis of women working in traditionally male dominant justice occupations of law, policing, and corrections. This Second Edition represents not only a thorough update of research on women in these fields, but a careful reconsideration of changes in justice organizations and occupations and their impact on women?s justice work roles over the past 40 years.

New to the Second Edition:  

• Introduces a wider range of workplace diversity and experiences: An expanded sociological theoretical framework grasps the interplay of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in understanding workplace identities and inequities.
• Provides a better understanding of the centrality of gender issues to understanding the legal and criminal justice system in general: This edition further connects women?s work experiences to social trends and consequent changes in legal system and in criminal justice agencies.
• Offers a more international perspective: More material is included on women lawyers, police, and correctional officers in countries outside the U.S.

Intended Audience:  
This is an excellent supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses such as Gender & Work; Women and Work; Sociology of Work and Occupations; Women and the Criminal Justice System; and Gender Justice in the departments of Sociology, Criminal Justice, Women?s Studies, and Social Work.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Changes in Criminal Justice,
Occupations, and Women in the Workplace

Before 1972, the number of women employed in the justice system as police officers, lawyers, judges, and correctional officers (COs) was minuscule; those women were excluded from most jobs that entailed the exercise of authority over men. Women worked only as “specialists,” drawing on qualities and skills associated with their gender. For example, policewomen supervised women and juvenile arrestees and performed secretarial work. Women lawyers were concentrated in specialties deemed “appropriate” for women, such as domestic relations; they rarely litigated cases or became judges. Women COs worked in prisons for women or in juvenile institutions where their capacity for “mothering” was considered beneficial for rehabilitating delinquent youth.

As part of a larger societal trend, women have entered the workplace in increasing numbers and moved into occupations traditionally filled by men only. Since the late 1970s, a growing number of women work in all parts of the justice system. In the criminal justice system (CJS), police agencies hire women as patrol officers, and probation and parole departments assign mixed-gender caseloads to women. Local jails, state correctional systems, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons hire women to guard men inmates. Women lawyers handle civil and criminal cases as private or governmental attorneys and serve as judges and magistrates. Women also comprise a growing proportion of the professors in law schools and departments of criminal justice, criminology, and sociology, where they educate the next generation of CJS personnel. Women are also advancing in justice fields; more women have been promoted and hold visible leadership positions. To some extent, the presence of women in these realms is now taken for granted.

Despite these inroads, individual and organizational resistance to women in justice fields continues, and women are often still treated as second-class citizens in the station house, courtroom, and prison. The obstacles faced by women justice workers are part of organizational and societal arrangements that construct and reinforce women’s subordination to men. Women in fields numerically dominated by men face many barriers: exclusion from informal work cultures; hostility expressed in social interactions; organizational policies that permit gender segregation, differential assignments, sexual harassment; and the marginalization of women with family responsibilities. The confluence of these barriers often produces fewer recruits, lower pay, slower advancement, and in some cases, higher dropout rates for the women in these fields.

Resistance to women may be associated with the social control functions of justice occupations. Criminologist Frances Heidensohn (1992, p. 99) has argued that social control is a “profoundly gender-linked concept.” Women have always helped to maintain social order, initially only informally in the family. Later, women were given institutional authority over children and other women but had to operate within control systems dominated by men; they rarely were granted formal authority over men.

The view that men “own” order and have sole rights to preserve it, seems to be at the core of much of the equality debates. (Heidensohn, 1992, p. 215)

This book examines the organization of justice occupations along gender lines. In investigating these occupations, we note that they involve more than a set of tasks or the source of a paycheck. An occupation provides social and emotional rewards and affects many aspects of life and identity. It influences the manner in which a person is treated by others, even outside of work. It also defines social status and shapes income, lifestyle, and children’s life chances. In industrial societies, what one does is a primary source of who one is (R. H. Hall, 1994, pp. 6–9).

We examine the justice system occupations of policing, law, and corrections. We focus broadly on the field of law, both civil and criminal, and more narrowly on municipal policing and correctional security in men’s prisons. Our choices reflect both the limited literature available on other aspects of justice work and the intense gender-based resistance to women who enter these three fields.¹ This book addresses the following questions:

1. Historically how have the roles of women working in the justice system changed, and how are such changes connected to larger societal and occupational transformations?
2. What barriers have women in justice occupations encountered at the interpersonal, organizational, occupational, and societal levels?
3. How have women performed in their expanded duties and how have they responded to work-related barriers?
4. What effects have women had on the justice system, victims, offenders, coworkers, and the public?
5. What barriers and challenges are women in the CJS likely to face in the future?

The answers to these questions combine three divergent areas of inquiry: work and occupations, the justice system, and gender studies and changes in each area. We are especially interested in how gender differences are constructed, maintained, challenged, and reconstructed in the workplace.

Gendered divisions of labor in the justice system and elsewhere are part of larger ongoing processes of differentiation in society. Social differentiation, or the practice of distinguishing categories based on some attribute or set of attributes, is a fundamental social process and the basis for differential evaluations and unequal rewards. Differentiation assumes, magnifies, and even creates behavioral and psychological differences to ensure that the subordinate group differs from the dominant one. It presumes that differences are “natural” and desirable. Social differentiation based on gender is found in virtually every society (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Gender differences are produced simultaneously with differentiation along a variety of dimensions, including class, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. We will argue that the social accomplishment of such differences occurs simultaneously and is integrally linked with the production of social inequality, shaping the social location of individuals and the social institutions in which they work, live, and interact (Burgess-Proctor, 2006; Fenstermaker & West, 2002). The production of difference is also influenced by the perception and control of human bodies, and we will attend to the ways in which bodies figure in to policing, law, and correctional work.

The next section of this chapter provides a brief overview of the CJS mission. It is followed by discussions of the history of women in justice occupations, and socioeconomic conditions that led to expanding opportunities for women workers.

The CJS: Mission, Processes, and Workforce

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The mission of the CJS is to control conduct that violates the criminal laws of the state. The components of the CJS include law enforcement, courts, and corrections; they are responsible for the prevention and detection of crime, and the apprehension, adjudication, sentencing, punishment, and rehabilitation of criminals. Critics argue that the term “criminal justice system” is a misnomer for several reasons. First, although components are linked in the processing of criminal offenses, coordination across agencies often is lacking. Agencies are characterized by internal and interorganizational conflicts over goals, resources, and authority that are complicated because these agencies work at different levels of government and often have overlapping jurisdictions. Second, critics argue that the CJS does not promote justice (Belknap, 2001; Clear, Cole, & Reisig, 2006). The U.S. CJS is large and costly, and its funding often comes at the expense of vital social service and educational programs. Third, the CJS disproportionately focuses on “street crimes” to the exclusion of crimes by corporate executives and other societal elites. This leads to a fourth and related critique: the overrepresentation of poor men of color as offenders convinces many analysts that, across all stages, the CJS not only replicates but magnifies racism (Christie, 2000; Parenti, 1999). Critics also argue that the CJS reinforces class and gender inequalities that characterize the larger social context (Belknap, 2001; A. Y. Davis, 2003).

Total expenditures for the CJS in 2001 were more than $167 billion dollars, about half of which were spent on salaries for the nearly 2.3 million CJS employees (Bauer & Owens, 2004). That year, more than a million persons (or about 46 percent of CJS employees) worked for law enforcement agencies, mostly in 18,000 local police and sheriff’s departments, and about 488,000 people (21 percent of CJS employees) worked for local, state, and federal courts. Corrections has several subsystems: local jails; state and federal prisons; community corrections, including probation, parole, and community residential centers; and juvenile corrections. By 2001, these agencies employed 747,000 people (more than double the nearly 300,000 corrections employees in 1982; Bauer & Owens, 2004).

The CJS has undergone significant expansion and transition since women first became involved in the mid-19th century. These changes have been associated with women’s expanding roles as CJS workers.

Historical Context of Women in Justice Occupations

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The ratio of men to women in occupations, in the justice system and elsewhere, is seldom static. Internal pressures within work organizations and in larger social and economic arenas produce changes. To understand women’s situation today, we must consider their CJS work history, and the role of the women’s movement in promoting expanding work opportunities for women.

Throughout the 19th century, U.S. justice and crime control were inefficient and corrupt; reforms were sporadic and ineffectual. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, women entered the public sector through participation in moral improvement campaigns to end slavery, adopt prohibition, and establish social welfare institutions such as the juvenile court. A first-wave feminist movement fought for women’s right to vote, obtain an education, and own property. Women’s groups also addressed a wide range of other social issues, including the identification of economic deprivation and men’s moral depravity as causes of poverty, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and criminality among women. Reformers attacked public indifference to the poor and moral double standards for men and women. By caring for “fallen women,” they hoped to bring about a moral reordering of society (Heidensohn, 1992; Schulz, 2004).

At first, women worked through volunteer social services. However, as they succeeded in getting the state to assist and extend social control over the poor, many women sought formal positions in public institutions. They presented themselves as specialists in working with women and children (Rafter, 1990). They argued for police matrons to “save wayward youth and helpless women from the evils of industrialism, alcohol, and other abuses” (S. E. Martin, 1980, p. 22). They demanded that prisons hire matrons to work with incarcerated women and children and that they be housed in facilities separate from men’s prisons (Freedman, 1981).

In their efforts to protect women from men and from their own worst instincts, reformers became part of social control systems dominated by men. Ironically, as reformers tried to curb vice and crime, they simultaneously participated in the oppressive “protection” of their own sex, especially targeting impoverished or working-class women and girls (Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2004). Although they carved out new forms of women’s work, early CJS professionals reinforced gender stereotypes that subsequently limited women’s career possibilities for more than half a century (Schulz, 2004).

Early in the 20th century, immigration, urban migration, the failure of prohibition, and the rise of organized crime compounded CJS problems and made periodic reform efforts short-lived. In 1931, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (appointed two years earlier by President Hoover to conduct a national study of the American CJS and known as the Wickersham Commission) detailed the lawlessness of the police and shortcomings of the U.S. justice system. However, the Depression and World War II impeded implementation of the suggested reforms. During this period, women’s CJS work opportunities stagnated. From the 1930s to the 1970s, women’s numbers diminished, and restrictions on their duties continued.

However, a series of social and economic changes that began with World War II culminated in the expansion of women’s work roles. Almost three decades of economic prosperity after this war obscured the seeds of disaffection and rebellion that exploded in the 1960s and 1970s. Precipitating conditions included the middle-class exodus to the suburbs, cultural values focused on consumption, deteriorating inner cities, rising urban crime rates, political corruption, racism, poverty, and gender subordination (Davey, 1995; Echols, 1989). These social tensions converged with CJS problems that had been ignored since the 1920s. The result was a turbulent decade that included the Civil Rights and antiwar movements, urban riots, political assassinations, the women’s movement, and lesbian/gay rights movement.

A second wave of feminism was stimulated by women’s participation in civil rights and antiwar activities, especially when women were denied leadership positions in these movements (Freedman, 2002). Once set in motion, the women’s movement created a dynamic pattern in which legal changes altered social attitudes and led to further demands for change, culminating in greatly expanded work opportunities for women in the CJS and elsewhere. The movement was fueled by increases in women’s education and massive entry into paid work that were largely unnoticed in the 1950s and 1960s. These changes stimulated middle class women’s frustration with the “feminine mystique” (Friedan, 1963) and contributed to the formation of groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW supported the anti–sex-discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and the expansion of abortion rights (Freedman, 2002).

Much of the initial energy of a unified women’s movement was dissipated by the mid-1970s through factionalism and by the unsuccessful battle over the ERA. Nevertheless, congressional passage of the ERA and the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion a legal option for women meant that feminism was taken more seriously. Feminist goals, such as women’s rights to paid employment, equal pay for equal work, and jobs in all occupations without limitations imposed by sex discrimination, became more socially accepted. The women’s movement became more institutionalized during the 1980s and won many legal victories related to antidiscrimination laws, sexual harassment, and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, which was renewed in 1998 and 2005.

By the 1980s, however, women of color and lesbians attacked the second-wave women’s movement for centering on the experiences of white middle class women in framing feminist agendas (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983). The movement was also criticized for ignoring the experiences of poor women and women with children in its initial program for change. These critiques have led to a broader feminist agenda designed to address the needs of these formerly excluded groups. Expanded feminist approaches stressed multiple sites of inequality and dominance that included race, class, and sexual orientation as well as gender discrimination. This “intersectional” model examines gender “through the lens of difference while at the same time acknowledging the instrumental role of power in shaping gender relations” (Burgess-Proctor, 2006, p. 35).

The social activism of the 1950s through 1970s stimulated a variety of changes in the legal system and in the CJS. These legal shifts converged with economic trends to increase the demand for and supply of women workers in justice occupations.

Legal Changes

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During the 1960s and 1970s, legislation extended civil rights and equal employment opportunities to formerly excluded social groups, including women. Interpretation of these laws by courts has shaped both the implementation and effectiveness of this legislation in three areas critical to working women: equal employment opportunity, sexual harassment, and the treatment of pregnancy and maternity leave.

Equal Employment Opportunity Law

Equal employment opportunity law rests on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, which expanded coverage of Title VII to most private and public employers, including state and local governments. Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, creed, color, sex, or national origin with regard to hiring, compensation, terms, conditions, and privileges of employment. Employers may not refuse to hire, segregate, or classify employees so as to deprive them of employment opportunities because of sex. An exception is permitted only if it can be proven that sex is “a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) reasonably necessary for the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise.” This interpretation is warranted only “where it is necessary for the purpose of authenticity or genuineness,” such as in hiring an actor or actress. The law prohibits an employer from refusing to hire a woman because of assumptions about the comparative employment characteristics of women in general (e.g., they are not as strong as men), because of gender stereotypes (e.g., that women are less capable of aggressive “salesmanship”), or because of the preferences of coworkers, employers, clients, or customers (Federal Register, 1965, p. 14927). Title VII also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce its provisions.

In the early 1970s, several cases challenged sex-based classifications that had limited women’s work opportunities. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Supreme Court made it easier to win discrimination cases by ruling that the plaintiff does not have to prove that the employer intended to discriminate. Once a plaintiff shows that job qualifications disproportionately exclude a group or class, the burden falls on the employer to prove that the requirements are BFOQs and that no other selection mechanisms can be substituted. Application of this standard (i.e., discriminatory impact regardless of intent) invalidated minimum height and weight requirements that had excluded women from police and corrections work.

In 1965, “affirmative action” began with Presidential Executive Order 11246, which required all federal contractors to develop written affirmative action policies to redress past discrimination by increasing recruitment, promotion, rete...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Changes in Criminal Justice, Occupations, and Women in the Workplace
• 2. Explanations for Gender Inequality in the Workplace
• 3. The Nature of Police Work and Women’s Entry Into Law Enforcement
• 4. Women Officers Encountering the Gendered Police Organization
• 5. Women Entering the Legal Profession: Change and Resistance
• 6. The Organizational Logic of the Gendered Legal World and Women Lawyers’ Response
• 7. Women in Corrections: Advancement and Resistance
• 8. Gendered Organizational Logic and Women CO Response
• 9. Doing Justice, Doing Gender Today and Tomorrow: Occupations, Organizations, and Change
• References
• List of Cases Cited
• Index
• About the Authors