Criminology And Criminal Justice Essay
Criminology and Criminal Justice http://crj.sagepub.com Partners in crime: A study of the relationship between female offenders and their co-defendants
Stephen Jones
Criminology and Criminal Justice 2008; 8; 147
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808088992
The online version of this article can be found at: http://crj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/2/147 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of:
British Society of Criminology
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The idea of male drug users living off the earnings of their female partners has been referred to as the ‘Easy Rider Syndrome’ (Wellisch et al., 1970). In her study of female drug users in Glasgow, Taylor (1993) found evidence of this ‘arrangement’. Not surprisingly, it was resented by the women.
An alternative form of manipulation was for the man to persuade the woman to take all the blame for the crime. Nina thought this was natural because of her boyfriend’s criminal record:
Nina: He just started a fight and I broke the fight up and I like stuck up for him and said it was me that did the man as well.
SJ: You said you had done it.
Nina: Yeah, just to get him a discharge.
SJ: Is that because he had a kind of a bad record?
Nina: Yeah … They love me in the police station because I just plead guilty straight away.
Chris was even willing to sacrifice her clean record for the good of her co-defendant: Yeah, I wanted him out of jail, and seeing as I was a clean character with …show more content…
(D) The co-defendants were ‘equal’ partners in the crime
Although the accounts given by a clear majority of the women indicated— at the very least—coercive or manipulative behaviour on the part of a male co-defendant, in about one-third of the interviews it appeared that the woman had been a willing participant in the crime. Gemma made it clear that she would not be pushed around:
When I’m out, and if I’m not with my old man, I go out earning with someone else and, if they are there, then they are there; no-one tells me I have got to go out earning for money.
Victoria had been physically violent to her co-defendant:
What it as, though, I was sleeping in [his] flat and I fell asleep and when I woke up my cousin told me that the bloke had had his hand down my trousers, so I tied him up to a chair and put duck tape round him and put fishing wire in his
Stephen Jones
Criminology and Criminal Justice 2008; 8; 147
DOI: 10.1177/1748895808088992
The online version of this article can be found at: http://crj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/2/147 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of:
British Society of Criminology
Additional services and information for Criminology and Criminal Justice can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://crj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://crj.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav …show more content…
The idea of male drug users living off the earnings of their female partners has been referred to as the ‘Easy Rider Syndrome’ (Wellisch et al., 1970). In her study of female drug users in Glasgow, Taylor (1993) found evidence of this ‘arrangement’. Not surprisingly, it was resented by the women.
An alternative form of manipulation was for the man to persuade the woman to take all the blame for the crime. Nina thought this was natural because of her boyfriend’s criminal record:
Nina: He just started a fight and I broke the fight up and I like stuck up for him and said it was me that did the man as well.
SJ: You said you had done it.
Nina: Yeah, just to get him a discharge.
SJ: Is that because he had a kind of a bad record?
Nina: Yeah … They love me in the police station because I just plead guilty straight away.
Chris was even willing to sacrifice her clean record for the good of her co-defendant: Yeah, I wanted him out of jail, and seeing as I was a clean character with …show more content…
(D) The co-defendants were ‘equal’ partners in the crime
Although the accounts given by a clear majority of the women indicated— at the very least—coercive or manipulative behaviour on the part of a male co-defendant, in about one-third of the interviews it appeared that the woman had been a willing participant in the crime. Gemma made it clear that she would not be pushed around:
When I’m out, and if I’m not with my old man, I go out earning with someone else and, if they are there, then they are there; no-one tells me I have got to go out earning for money.
Victoria had been physically violent to her co-defendant:
What it as, though, I was sleeping in [his] flat and I fell asleep and when I woke up my cousin told me that the bloke had had his hand down my trousers, so I tied him up to a chair and put duck tape round him and put fishing wire in his