Women Under Lock and Key: A View from the Inside

sumably inspired by the women’s movement, she was beginning to seek equality in the underworld just as her more conventional counterparts were pursuing their rights in more acceptable arenas. These accounts generally relied on two types of evidence to support the notion of a relationship between the women’s rights movement and increasing female criminality: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics showing dramatic increases in the number of women arrested for nontraditional crimes and sensationalistic accounts of the activities of female political activists such as Leila Khaled, Bernardine Dohrn, Susan Saxe, and Emily Harris. Of course, the involvement of women in political or terrorist activity is nothing new, as the activities of Joan of Arc and Charlotte Corday demonstrate. Arrest data collected by the FBI, however, seemed to provide more objective evidence that dramatic changes in the number of women arrested were occurring. For example, between 1960 and 1975 arrests of adult females went up 60.2 percent, and arrests of juvenile women increased a startling 253.9 percent. In specific, nontraditional crimes, the increases were even more astounding. For example, between 1960 and 1975, the number of women arrested for murder was up 105.7 percent, forcible rape arrests increased by 633.3 percent, and robbery arrests were up 380.5 percent (L1.S. Department of Justice, Federal