In this text Ann Jones is most focused on the gender bias of

criminality. She gives examples to support this claim. Her project

would be to analyze the gender bias in society towards criminals
and she confirms such a bias among lawmakers from at least a
century back.
Ann jones takes the singular case of Peachie and explains how it
wasnt that common for women to commit crimes of this magnitude.
Since it was so unexpected the jury usually do not treat the women
criminals equally. This is related to the feeling one gets while
assessing a case, generally people are not scared when they look at
a female who commits crime. In Peachies case she was under
sentenced to the point that she had to request the jury to look at her
as equal to a man, she wanted to be looked as one of the so-called
new breed of violent female criminals.
Ann goes on to analyze Freda Adlers work on criminology and how it
accommodates feminism. She uses Adlers statistics to show the
increasing crime wave among women and how the growth in women
criminals is much greater than that of women. Ann uses the words
like unsexing and femininity to show the impact of crime on
women. She says that committing so many crimes and at an
increasing rate is bad for women in general as it is equal to losing
the sexual identity and says it makes them more masculine.
She than goes on to look at the works if the father of modern
criminality Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso says that the women do not
become criminals but are born criminals. He says that a normal
women would gladly sacrifice her entire personality for her loved
one, on the other hand he says criminal women are scarcely women
at all, and he approximates them to males. Lombroso goes out of his
way to find a picture of a girl who he thinks can be identified as a
women criminal at a young age.
Ann then talks about Pollaks work. The similarity between the
people Ann has chosen to review is that all of them use their
knowledge or their preconceived notion of what women are and how
they should behave. Pollak says women commit more crimes than
we care to admit or notice. He says they commit as many if not
more crimes than men but only they are so trivial that they go

unnoticed. He creates this idea of masked crime where a crime of

small magnitude is hidden in a larger crime or behind a more
obvious larger action. Ann says that Pollak has proved on the basis
of no evidence what so ever that women are every bit violent and
criminal as men.
Ann says that in actuality the sentences received by women
offenders is more than their male counterparts. Female criminals
tend to be first time offenders and dont get sentenced while repeat
offenders tend to get heavier sentences than men. She says some
feminist critics go to the extent of calling the criminology system
retarded. Ann asks some tough questions where there is clear
distinguishing between men and women. The reason there is so
much confusion is because there is a conflict between ancient and
modern criminology. The laws and rules that society accepted in the
old days will no longer apply today. There are still people arguing for
the laws which are outdated. A simple analysis will show that there
are many more complex situation and social norms in the present
day and age, we simply cannot draw from some ancestral ideology.
A very apt way to put it would be although history may rhyme with
itself it will never repeat itself, so there is no point in looking back
and trying to solve problems today with reference to the historical
similarity.
The introduction revolves around a very complex dynamic argument
in the sense the societal view on the idea is ever changing and is
influenced by some very influential statistics and opinion but they
may not be entirely true. It is hard to capture the essence of such a
problem. Ann Jones has tried to represent the problem in its entirety
and has succeeded for the most part. The most frustrating part of
the Introduction is that there is very little original opinion and that
she just throws a bunch of statistics and quotes others while there is
less original content representing her original opinion in the matter.