In the past thirty years, women and crime has become a major
intellectual and professional specialty. The Crimes Women Commit: The
Punishments They Receive represents the third edition of Women in Crime,
a classic in the field by Rita J. Simon first published in 1975. This
revised and updated edition takes advantage of the fact that women are
more represented in official crime statistics today than they have been
at any time since systemic national data has been available. Rita J.
Simon and Heather Ahn-Redding present the most current demographic data
and updates of the arrest, conviction, and prison statistics reported in
the first and second editions as they examine issues such as women's
labor force participation, the percentage of female-headed households in
which women are the caretakers of young children, as well as trends in
how female crime statistics are reported. This classic text will become
an essential tool for teachers and researchers within criminology and
criminal justice, and among the subfields within sociology, psychology,
and economics, where research on women who commit crimes has grown into
a major area of interest.