‘She’s White and She’s Hot, So She Can’t Be Guilty’: Female Criminality, Penal Spectatorship, and White Protectionism

Abstract

Despite mainstream criminology’s burgeoning interest in issues of race, class, and gender, very little scholarship has examined whiteness and its attendant privileges in understanding public discourse on criminal offenders. This paper examines the role of penal spectatorship as a discursive mechanism by which white, female offenders are protected in public spaces by virtue of their racial and gender identity. Using a content analysis of comments posted on the mug shot images of white women on a popular ‘mug shot website,’ we find that these women are viewed as victims of circumstance deserving of empathy and redemption rather than as criminals. We offer ‘white protectionism’ as a means by which whites extend privilege and protection to other whites who transverse the boundaries of whiteness through criminality to guard against ‘deviant’ or ‘criminal’ designations. These findings add to our understandings of penal spectatorship as yet another tool of white supremacy operating in the Post-Civil Rights era of mass incarceration.

Keywords:

• penal spectatorship
• whiteness
• female offenders
• white privilege
• white protectionism
• mug shots
• visual criminology

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank John Lang for reviewing earlier drafts of this piece and Erika Martin for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. White protectionism is situated within ‘Whiteness studies’ – a literature that focuses on white racial identity as a socially constructed category and interrogates both the invisibility of whiteness and its role in the reproduction of white privilege, racism, and racial inequality (see Anderson, 1976; Bonilla-Silva, 2001, 2003; Doane & Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Du Bois, 1920, 1935; Dyer, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Haney Lopez, 1996; Hartigan, 2005; Hill, 1997; hooks, 1992; McIntosh, 1988; Painter, 2010; Rafter, 1988a, 1988b; Roediger, 1993, 1994; Wray & Newitz, 1997).

2. For those who wish to have their arrest information and/or mug shot ‘unpublished’ from the site, one can pay $400.00 to have just one record removed and up to $1479.00 to have four records removed.

3. For further explanation, please refer to the ‘About’ section of Mugshots.com (Mugshots.com/about.html).

4. According to the web traffic data from Quantcast.com/mugshots.com and Siteanalytics.compete.com/mugshots.com (2013).

5. Attempts to contact mugshots.com to determine how these women’s images – including other images in the banner – were selected and received no response.

6. For one mug shot that had fewer than 200 comments, all were coded.

7. Mugshots.com uses Facebook’s integrated comments box feature that displays comments ordered by the most-liked or active discussion threads, while hiding spam comments. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/.

8. Extraneous comments do not reference the mug shot in a direct or indirect way. We determined the race and sex of commenters through their Facebook picture or profile data. Commenters’ gender, race, and ethnicity were coded by an initial coder, and 20% of the sample was checked by a second coder. Percentage agreement was 100%. Some commenters posted via their email addresses rather than through Facebook integration, in which case we were unable to determine both the commenter’s gender and race/ethnicity. 750 comments that were deemed extraneous or posted by people of unknown gender or race/ethnicity were dropped from the sample. We found no significant content differences in the comments from people of known and unknown race/ethnicity and gender.

9. Brennan and Vandenberg (2009) coded news stories on female offenders as neutralizing if they included themes involving: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of victim, appeal to higher loyalty, condemnation of the condemners, and reformation through disengagement. Stories that involved guilt attributed, real injury, real victim, self-interest, praise for the condemners, and no hope for reformation were coded as exacerbating.