Division of Women and Criminal Justice
Book Review

IT'S A CRIME: WOMEN AND JUSTICE (THIRD EDITION)
BY: ROSLYN MURASKIN
PEARSON EDUCATION 2003 PRENTICE HALL
REVIEWED BY: ROSE MARIE ROTONDI
MPA STUDENT, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

It's a Crime: Women and Justice is a comprehensive book that addresses a variety of issues related to women as victims, offenders and law enforcers. It also provides extensive historical references regarding women's rights. I found this book extremely interesting and informative. The compilation of articles in this book will benefit students, scholars and practitioners.

This book is divided into eight sections covering diverse topics, each making up eight sections of the book. These include historical developments of women's issues, women and the law, drugs and AIDS, women in prison, women as domestic violence victims, women in criminal justice professions, women as offenders, and delinquency among girls. With 34 chapters and a page constraint on this book review, I have chosen to briefly highlight the breadth and depth of information provided by each section of this work.

Section 1, introduces the long journey of women's rights. It begins with Sojourner Truth's speech at the Women's Rights Convention in 1815, the organization of the feminist movement at Seneca Falls, and the struggle of women to earn the right to vote. The section proceeds to document the nature of women's rights issues and ends with an acknowledgement of how far women have come. It also identifies the long road that women still have to go to achieve constitutional protection that is equal to that of men.

Section 2 encompasses the many ways that women can come into contact with the law, for example through cases of postpartum syndrome, sexual harassment and abortion. This section does a wonderful job of explaining these situations and discussing how the law influences women's decisions in these situations. The historical references help the reader grasp the existence of these problems and how they have affected women for centuries.

Section 3, titled "Women, Drugs, and AIDS" discusses just that. The section begins with images of crack mothers as portrayed by evening news programs from 1983 to 1994. It then proceeds with a discussion of the criminal justice response to women with AIDS. In my opinion, this section will be particularly effective in grasping the attention and interest of students in a classroom as well as practitioners in the field. Students will be introduced to the impact of drugs and AIDS on women and the media portrayal of female victims and mothers on drugs. This section also provides a great deal of information for practitioners on how to respond to this group of women.

Section 4 -- the largest section of this book -- is titled, "Women in Prison." The large number of chapters included in this section allowed for the identification of a wide variety of issues facing incarcerated women. Issues of inequality and disparate treatment of women to sexual abuse in prisons and the death penalty are explored. This section will be quite useful in providing students with a breadth of information about the special issues concerning women and prisons as well as provide a critique of legal and correctional policies that disparately impact women.

Section 5 is devoted to examining issues related to women as victims of violence. College instructors seeking a way to create discussion in the classroom will find this section of the book helpful. In recent years a great deal of research has been conducted exploring issues related to women as victims, and this section raises intriguing questions about the impact of legal and social policy on victims of violence. This section examines a number of questions that will also be of interest to scholars and practitioners relating to the impact of arrest policies as well as stalking, a typology of forced sexual intercourse, and the influence of culture on wife abuse.

Section 6 discusses women in criminal justice professions. This section examines women and various criminal justice professions, i.e., as judges, in the legal profession, as police officers and correctional officers. The articles in this section take historical, critical and policy perspectives on women in these criminal justice roles. This section will be particularly interesting for students who are considering a career in criminal justice.

Sections 7 and 8 of the book, "Women and Crime" and "Girls and Delinquency" respectively, seem to be provided as follow-up to the issues raised in Section 2 by discussing the many reasons why women, young and adult, turn to a delinquent lifestyles. Section 7 provides several articles that introduce such unique discussions as females in organized crime, females as serial killers and an exploration of the reasons women kill their children. In exploring these topics, the authors provide a number of examples which will grasp the attention of students and promote class discussion.

Section 8 explores three issues related to female delinquency -- prevention, career types and transitions to adult crime, and media portrayals of females as delinquents. Much remains unknown about female delinquency and this section provides a nice review of three important issues concerning this topic.

Overall, this book provides a valuable contribution to the field due to the breadth of information explored concerning issues of women and criminal justice. This book will provide scholars and practitioners with fundamental resources on a variety of topics and will be useful as a text for students in a course on women and criminal justice.