Women, Crime and Poverty by Carlen

Carlen’s question: why do some women turn to crime?

Pat Carlen’s Women, Crime and Poverty (1988) examined female criminality from a feminist perspective. Rather than concentrating only on why women commit fewer crimes than men, she explored why some women do offend. Her explanation connects working-class women’s opportunities at work and their experiences within families.

Carlen studied 39 women aged between 15 and 46, most of whom were working class. All had been convicted of one or more crimes, and some were in prison or youth custody when she interviewed them. She used in-depth, unstructured interviews, allowing women to describe their experiences and the influences on their criminal careers in their own words.

Control through promised rewards

Carlen used control theory, which asks what keeps people conforming to society’s rules. Its starting point is that human beings are neither naturally good nor naturally bad. People may make a rational decision to offend when they believe the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Here, ‘rational’ means weighing up perceived benefits and costs. It does not mean that crime is morally right, or that the decision will actually produce a good outcome.

Social control does not operate only through punishment. People may also conform because they expect rewards from following accepted ways of living. For Carlen, paid work and family life offered working-class women two sets of promised rewards: the class deal and the gender deal. These are not formal contracts, but expectations about what respectable behaviour will bring.

The class deal: paid work in exchange for consumer goods

The class deal promises respectable working-class women access to consumer goods in return for earning a wage. Working and following society’s rules should allow them to buy the things they need or want.

This promise encourages conformity because women have something to gain from paid work and something to lose through offending. However, it becomes less convincing if respectable employment is unavailable or wages are too low to provide the expected rewards.

Women in Carlen’s study described lacking opportunities to earn a decent living. If lawful work did not provide a route out of poverty, crime could appear to offer more to gain than to lose. The important connection is not simply ‘poverty causes crime’: it is that the failure of the promised rewards weakens the incentive to conform.

The gender deal: domestic labour in exchange for support

The gender deal promises psychological and material rewards from a male breadwinner in return for women’s love and domestic labour. Psychological rewards include affection and fulfilment; material rewards include financial support and security. Domestic labour is unpaid household work, such as cooking, cleaning and caring.

This deal can encourage women to follow conventional family roles because they expect support and happiness in return. But those rewards may be unavailable or illusory: promised rather than genuinely experienced.

Some women in Carlen’s study had experienced abuse by partners or fathers. Others had lived in residential care and lacked supportive family bonds. Such experiences undermined the expectation that conventional family life would provide security and affection. If women had little rewarding family life to protect, this form of social control could lose its force.

Why the breakdown of the deals matters

Carlen argued that both deals could conceal exploitation. Employers benefited from working-class women’s labour, while men benefited from women’s unpaid domestic work. Yet the appearance of fairness and respectability could keep women conforming as long as they believed the rewards were attainable.

When those expectations broke down, crime became a viable alternative, not an inevitable outcome. A woman might judge that offending offered a way to obtain resources that work or family life had failed to provide, despite the risk of punishment.

Carlen therefore connects class inequality and gender inequality with the weakening of social control. She shares the emphasis of control explanations on the importance of forces that prevent crime, but adds a feminist analysis of whose labour sustains those arrangements and who receives their benefits.

How convincing is Carlen’s explanation?

The interviews provide detailed qualitative evidence about women’s experiences and the meanings they attached to offending. An unstructured approach lets the researcher follow important issues raised by participants rather than restricting them to fixed answers. This helps explain how women understood the failure of the two deals.

However, 39 women form a relatively small sample, so the findings cannot confidently be generalised to all women who offend. The study also focused on convicted women. Without comparing them with women who experienced similar poverty or family difficulties but did not offend, it is difficult to explain why hardship leads to crime for some but not others.

There are limitations to the interview evidence too. Accounts of past events depend on memory, and participants may present their decisions in ways that justify their behaviour. Their explanations are valuable, but do not by themselves prove that the breakdown of the deals caused their offending.

Overall, Carlen offers a useful explanation of how failed rewards can weaken social control. Her findings support the view that crime becomes more likely when people have less to gain from conformity, but they do not establish that poverty or an unrewarding family life inevitably produces crime.

Study essentials

Pat Carlen, Women, Crime and Poverty (1988): feminist application of control theory.

• Sample: 39 convicted women, mostly working class, aged 15–46; some in prison or youth custody.
• Method: in-depth, unstructured interviews.

Two deals

• Class deal: paid work → wages → consumer goods.
• Gender deal: love and domestic labour → psychological and material rewards from a male breadwinner.

Rewards unavailable or illusory → weaker social control → crime may seem to offer more benefits than costs. This increases the likelihood of offending; it does not make crime inevitable.

Evaluation

• Strength: detailed accounts connect women’s experiences of class and gender inequality with offending.
• Small sample: limited generalisability.
• Convicted women only: no comparison with women facing similar hardship who did not offend.
• Interview accounts: memory and self-justification may affect explanations; they do not prove causation.

Judgement: useful evidence that failed rewards can weaken conformity, but not a complete explanation of female crime.