Mothering in the Context of Criminalized Women's Lives: Implications for Offending
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While it is widely known that most women convicted of crime or serving time in prison are mothers, little research has focused specifically on whether and how the daily activity of mothering affects women’s criminal behaviour. On the one hand, criminalized women often report that parenting is important to them. If mothering reduces the opportunities to engage in crime, strengthens informal controls, and increases the costs of crime, it should discourage offending. On the other hand, the challenges of mothering are particularly onerous for women who are economically disadvantaged, marginalized, and socially isolated – that is, the types of women who are most likely to engage in crime. If children create an imperative for resources that women cannot accommodate legally while simultaneously exacerbating psychological and emotional strains, women may turn to criminal behaviour. Using a sample of 259 criminalized women, I explore the mothering-crime relationship by examining whether the daily responsibilities and demands of living with children affect month-to-month changes in women’s involvement in offending. Controlling for criminalized women’s relationships, socio-economic contexts, living arrangements, and leisure pursuits, I provide quantitative evidence about the relationship between mothering and property crime, drug use, drug dealing, and women’s use of violence against their intimate partners. I supplement this analysis with qualitative evidence from in-depth interviews with these women. Results indicate a non-uniform effect of mothering on criminalized women’s offending: living with children discourages women from engaging in property crime and using drugs, makes no difference to whether or not they deal drugs or engage in ‘mutual’ violence with intimate partners, and increases their use of ‘sole’ violence against intimate partners. I discuss why living with children is an important “local life circumstance” shaping variation in criminalized women’s commission of some, but not all, offences, and consider the policy implications of these findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".