Women become involved in criminal activity in different ways than men do. Kathleen Daly’s gendered pathways approach has been a useful framework for us to understand this. Generally, women become involved in crime because they have suffered abuse (physical and/or sexual) and neglect, or have become involved in negative and unhealthy relationship, which has made them vulnerable. This vulnerability puts women in positions where they need to commit crime to survive or provide for themselves financially.
The films that I have studied through my dataset and my case studies do not present this. Many of the criminal women in these films are sexualized, independent, resourceful, manipulative ‘badass’ women who have agency. Furthermore, the majority of these women were white and many came from wealthy socio-economic backgrounds. The films, by and large, do not show the reality of female criminality or represent the demographics of incarcerated women.
As films can play an important role in people’s construction of reality, it is important to understand what films present to us about specifically vulnerable people. The population of women in the US criminal justice system is growing, yet this is a fact that is arguably overlooked by society. The era of mass incarceration has affected the lives of so many, but the specific effect it has had on women, especially poor women and women of color, is not always at the forefront of the conversation about the US criminal justice system. If an inaccurate presentation of these women, that serves primarily as a form of sexualized entertainment, surrounds us in popular culture, then it is more difficult to convince people of the gross injustices of the US criminal justice system.
The US criminal justice system is flawed institution that is failing in its role to protect society. By understanding how different aspects of the system are presented to us through film, we can work to educate people on the reality of the experiences of incarcerated people, and attempt to deconstruct the sexist and racist structure of the criminal justice system.