Women and the Criminal Justice System

Product Description
This book presents an up-to-date analysis of women as victims of crime, as individuals under justice system supervision, and as professionals in the field. The text features an empowerment approach that is unified by underlying themes of the intersection of gender, race, and class, and evidence-based research. Personal narratives supplement research and statistics to help students connect the text material with real-life situations.
This new edition is informed by consideration of major ongoing social movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the fight to reduce mass incarceration. The text stresses contemporary topics such as recognition of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues in juvenile and adult facilities; the introduction of trauma-informed care in detention centers and prisons; the criminalization of Black girls and women; the effects of an increasingly militarized police culture; and the contributions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other influential women. With its emphasis on critical thinking, this text is ideal for undergraduate courses concerning women in the justice system.
Review
Women and the Criminal Justice System: Gender, Race, and Class is an essential text for teaching about women’s issues within the criminal justice system. Split into three primary sections, van Wormer and Bartollas examine how women are treated within the criminal legal system as perpetrators of harm, victims of harm, and as employees within the system. The authors deftly discuss key topics such as the victim-offender overlap, the global nature of violence against women, the adultification of Black girls, and sexual harassment. The authors use case studies and provide examples of recent criminal events, making this book a compelling and accessible read. Students will enjoy learning from the book, and professors will enjoy teaching from it.
Danielle Slakoff, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, California State University, Sacramento
For most of my career I have been lucky enough to learn from and use this comprehensive and intersectional text by Van Wormer and Bartollas in my criminal and social justice courses. Each new edition of Women and the Criminal Justice System: Gender, Race, and Class has shared important new insights, updates, concepts, and case studies, as well as new perspectives on the workings of courts, policing, and corrections institutions here and abroad. I use this work for many reasons but especially because, semester after semester, students benefit from an holistic, case by case understanding of the powerful roles of gender, race, and class in justice policy, programming, and in officers' own lives. But this latest edition is especially important for the 2021-2022 year and years to come. It creates that necessary context for students to understand current crises and reforms in terms of recent and dramatic new social change movements students are in desperate need of discussing, understanding, and reflecting upon in their own lives before they graduate, often into positions of complex social power in the criminal justice workplace.\nThis text will be the main tool I use to help students as so many of them learn and train to serve in a justice system undergoing needed gender, race, and class-informed reform. They will be part of a new social justice system that is learning how to adapt to waves of empowered grassroots movements while responding to new forms of technological oversight and political change. These movements and topics in this latest edition include the recent Me Too, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA movements as well as the impact of the COVID19 and opioid pandemics on social justice and class inequality in America and abroad. This will give my students important historical and civil rights context to these voices as well as theoretical depth and review so that students can understand the times we are living in and the meanings and values we are creat