Mihailis Diamantis (University of Iowa – College of Law) has posted Of Crime and Men on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article interrogates a criminal justice disparity so ancient and familiar that it has become part of the invisible backdrop against which all criminal justice plays out: ninety-three percent of inmates are men. Few legal scholars will find this statistic surprising or concerning. Men are more violent, and the criminal law has a legitimate interest in controlling their violence. But excavating a full and justifying account of the disparity proves surprisingly difficult. The men-are-violent narrative cannot explain our history of gendered enforcement across a wide range of non-violent offenses, like same-sex intercourse and drug use. Nor does it critically engage ways in which the criminal justice system itself transforms peaceful boys into violent men. The arguments below step systematically through male violence and a range of alternate accounts, finding them all incomplete, misinformed, and ethically dubious. What emerges is a new account, premised on criminal law’s complicity in entrenching toxic models masculinity and its false assumptions about male resilience.