Women’s Criminal Careers

Abstract

In 1985 I conducted taped interviews with 39 women between the ages of 15 and 46. Each had at least one criminal conviction, the vast majority had substantial ‘form’ and a disproportionate number had been convicted of a serious crime either of violence or against property. The main aims of the research were, first, to discover what the women themselves saw as being major influences upon, and turning points in, their criminal careers; and secondly, to explain both the sources of those self-perceptions and their effects. Each woman was told that I wanted her to describe her progress through law-breaking, police stations, courts and custodial institutions, and to start her narrative from the point where she thought her troubles had begun. Not surprisingly, all of the women asked me what I intended to do with the taped interviews after they had been transcribed. In reassuring them that all quotations from the transcripts would be used pseudonymously, I was also able to explain that no individual history would be used in full. I stressed that, as I was a sociologist, I would be looking mainly to social factors in investigating why their lives had gone the way they had. That in analysing the transcripts I would be trying, first, to ascertain what each individual biography had in common with the 38 others and, secondly, to describe and explain the variety of effects that these shared social factors had had on their criminal careers. In fact, what I told the women was how I hoped to translate their individual (autobiographical) oral histories into a socio-biographical analysis of women’s criminal careers (see Carlen, 1988).

This article has been constructed from extracts from my book Women, Crime and Poverty (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: Open University Press, 1988).