Voices from Within: Women Who Have Broken the Law

Andrea Levan is an assistant professor and co-ordinator of the Women’s
Studies Program, Thorneloe College, Laurentian University.

Evelyn Sommers uses her interviews with 14 women incarcerated in
Canadian prisons to explain why women come into conflict with the law.
She divides her subjects into four categories, based on their personal
analysis of the overriding factor that determined their behavior: need,
disconnection and the influence of others, anger, fear. Although these
artificial categories overlap somewhat and strain for similarities
between members of a group, the author defends them on the basis that
internal motivation, as each subject defines it, is important to a view
of lawbreaking in which individuals assume responsibility for their
actions and in which their actions are viewed as an active expression of
themselves and their situations.

Because each woman’s story is told in some detail, the book also
illuminates the social context of the women’s lives that contributed
to their coming into conflict with the law. Most of the women were
limited economically by low levels of education and the kinds of work
generally available to them. Many had dependents. Many had experienced
violence from partners or parents, or had abused drugs or alcohol. Many
had been deprived as children of relationships in which they were valued
for themselves—and indeed, many had been actively devalued. These
details are not surprising, and reflect the findings of many previous
studies.

Sommers agrees with other feminist scholars that these social factors
must be exposed and their impact on women recognized in order to
adequately understand female offenders. Early studies, which focused
only on individual “deviance,” were clearly lacking. However, she
argues as well for an integrated approach in which individual motivation
is also given adequate weight, pointing out that to do otherwise is to
silence the women and refuse to see them as agents responsible for their
own actions. The book adds little that is new to our knowledge of the
social causes of women’s lawbreaking, but it is a compassionate and
thoughtful examination of the stories of 14 women, and enriches our
understanding of how we might conduct further research and develop
effective programs to help them.