Since the end of the eighteenth century, when, as we have seen, imprisonment began to emerge as the dominant form of punishment, convicted women have been represented as essentially different from their male counterparts. It is true that men who commit the kinds of transgressions that are regarded as punishable by the state are labeled as social deviants. Nevertheless, masculine criminality has always been deemed more “normal” than feminine criminality. There has always been a tendency to regard those women who have been publicly punished by the state for their misbehaviors as significantly
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