Today in America, idealized notions of true womanhood continue to underlie the evaluation of female offenders in court and influence the type of punishments they receive. In the institutions themselves, these attitudes determine how women are treated, the type of educational and vocational opportunities open to them, and extend beyond this into release, influencing parole decisions.

It is apparent that findings of past research such as Simon's,⁶ which suggest that judges were chivalrous and consequently more lenient in their sentencing of women, are no longer valid. Stiff penalties are now commonplace for women, who are increasingly being imprisoned for crimes which would previously have resulted in non-custodial disposals. As a result, the number of women inmates nearly tripled in the last decade.⁷ This is due, to a large extent, to the harsher sentences women are now receiving for drug related offenses. In fact, it has been argued that the "war on drugs" had become a war on women and has contributed to the explosion in the women's prison population. In California, the state with the most female prisoners, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 400% between 1980 and 1995, from 1,316 women in 1980 to 8,231 as of February 1995.⁸ Over a third of the women were convicted for possession of drugs or for marijuana offenses, indicating that the majority of women in prison for drug related offenses were not engaged in high-level drug trafficking, but were couriers, intermediaries, or users.⁹

Thus, increasingly punitive responses to drug offenses accounts for a large part of the dramatic growth in the female prison population.¹⁰ Based on a comprehensive survey of women in all state facilities, a recent study found that "...women are substantially more likely than men to be serving time for a drug offense and less likely to have been sentenced for a violent crime" (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1994). In fact, the proportion of women imprisoned in state prisons for violent offenses actually dropped during the 1980s; in 1979,48.9% of the women in prison were incarcerated for violent offence; by 1986, this figure had fallen to 40.7%.¹¹

It is clear that the way men and women are sentenced is often related to the way they are perceived in court, rather than the seriousness of the crime itself. While men are typically evaluated by legal factors such as previous convictions and the actual offense, women are generally judged by their social circumstances, with the offense playing only a secondary role in determining their guilt.¹² Women who are considered "deviant" in some aspect of their social life are often sentenced more severely than those considered "respectable."¹³ Studies indicate, that family composition is significant and women who are married receive milder punishments than those who are single, as do women with children compared to those who are childless.¹⁴ Also, although probation officers consider family responsibilities in deciding how to deal with, male and female offenders, for men the main consideration is their wage-earning role, while for women it is their domestic role.¹⁵

The ideologies from which these distinctions stem stress traditional values of women's place in the home and view any form of deviance from this ideal as threat to society. If female offenders are believed to have strayed from their expected roles they have not only committed a crime by breaking the law, but also the crime of not conforming to their female gender-role stereotypes.¹⁶ For this double offense, only one solution is considered appropriate rehabilitation to an acceptable state of femininity. This involves learning to be "proper" women; in other words, being pure and submissive as wives, mothers and homemakers. ¹⁷ The appropriate place for this rehabilitation to occur is believed to be within an institution such as prison where all aspects of the regime can be geared towards this goal. Once incarcerated, the socio-economic backgrounds of the women and the communities to which they will return are ignored. They are offered no constructive help in altering their preincarceration situations, though it is assumed that upon release they will be ready to return to society as stable, self-supporting contributing members.¹⁸