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E-mail: blockisland98@yahoo.com This paper will address the issues surrounding the criminal incarceration of women in American society through the discussion of the views of Meda Chesney-Lind in her 1997 paper ": Sentencing Women to Prison." It will present criti ....

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.... crime has been taken away from the presiding judge's discretion. Important factors are not allowed to enter in the decision process such as why the crime was committed and by who. While the number of women behind bars has risen as of late, the number of violent offenders in these prisons has actually fallen quite drastically. The proportion of women in state prisons for violent offences declined from 48.9 percent in 1979 to 32.2 percent in 1991 (Chensey-Lind 1997). That would leave the remainder of the near tripling of incarcerated women since the 1980's as nonviolent offenders. Some of these women are imprisoned for property crimes, such as ....