Structure and Practice of Familial-Based Justice in a Criminal Court

Many explanations have been proposed for gender differences in criminal court outcomes, but none has been grounded in a systematic study of the reasoning processes used by court officials in sanctioning male and female defendants. Interviews with thirty-five court officials (prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers, and judges) are presented here to assess extant theory and to offer a reconceptualization of why gender differences may emerge in the course of “doing justice.” The interviews reveal that the sanctioning process is structured by familial paternalism, that is, a concern to protect family life, men's and women's labor for families, and those dependent on defendants. Familial paternalism more accurately explains family- and gender-based disparities in sentencing than existing social control arguments, and it is distinguished from female paternalism, which is based on the view that women, as the “weaker sex,” are subject to greater court protection than men before the criminal court.