[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Female Sentencing
Juvenile as well as criminal justice systems discriminate against adolescent and adult female offenders through indistinguishable and broad statutes and a propensity for a mainly male system to "protect," "treat," or "rehabilitate" females in American society, therefore supporting a double standard of justice. Certainly, most legal sex discrimination has an effect on the youthful female offender. Juvenile court laws that differentiate between boys and girls fall into two categories: the statutes themselves that identify what is or is not against the law also those statutes that present for the special treatment of females.
Women generally experience prejudicial treatment under the law through sex-specific statutes and their enforcement, such as prostitution and solicitation, but statutes also exist that discriminate in the sentencing of women, particularly indeterminant sentencing. Additional unequal treatment of women offenders is seen in the judicial sentencing procedures which result in indeterminant sentencing of women because of sex-differentiating statutes. As a result of such practices women end up serving longer periods of incarceration than men. Prior to 1869 women were tried under the same statutes as men, but with the institution of separate prison facilities by sex the use of the indeterminate sentence was initiated for women.
Such differential treatment is based upon the erroneous assumption that females can be rehabilitated more readily than males. This philosophy persists despite the fact that female offenders have not been demonstrated to be more model prisoners and thus earn earlier releases than men. In those states utilizing indeterminate sentences for women the women tend to serve longer sentences than the men.
In the past decade three major cases in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey have challenged laws that provide unequal sentences for women. The argument was that such statutes are in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection.Carrie Robinson, the defendant in Robinson v. York (1968), was found guilty of breaching the peace and resisting arrest......
