Women, Drugs, and Crime

Abstract

Throughout feminist criminological scholarship, a concerted effort has been focused on understanding the backgrounds, criminal contexts, and programming needs of criminalized women. It is clear that criminalized women enter the justice system with a host of interconnected experiences and issues, ranging from childhood victimization, sexual assault, and intimate partner abuse, to homelessness, poverty, and illness. While these contribute to the motivations and rationales of women’s criminality, they are often aggravated by drug addiction. In a variety of ways, drug use is interlaced with women’s efforts to survive on a daily basis. This article examines the role drugs play in criminalized women’s lives through the narratives of 30 incarcerated women.

Keywords:

• Race
• Women and Drugs
• Motivations and Rationales
• Women’s Involvement in Drug Use
• Dealing with Addiction