Women’s Pathways to Serious and Habitual Crime

Qualitative approaches for identifying and characterizing women’s pathways to crime are being augmented by quantitative methods. This study applies quantitative taxonomic methods in disaggregating a large sample of women offenders from a prison population to identify diverse pathway prototypes. An array of gender-responsive and gender-neutral factors and full criminal histories was used to characterize each pathway. Cross-sample and cross-method replication tests demonstrated the stable replication of these pathways. The identified prototypes were related to the prior literature, including Daly’s pathway models, Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy, and several prior taxonomic studies of women’s pathways. Eight reliable pathways were identified that were nested within four broad, superordinate pathway categories. Substantial links to the prior pathways literature were noted, although greater complexity was found to exist in the eight identified pathways.

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