Childhood Maltreatment and Adult Offending: A Look at Female Inmates in the U.S. - Oklahoma

"As can probably be surmised, then, females involved in the criminal justice system often arrive after experiencing abuse. In a recent study, Sharp (forthcoming) looked at the frequency of adverse childhood experiences for women prisoners in Oklahoma. She found that while about 21% of women from the general population reported experiencing sexual abuse as a child, well over half (56.1%) of the women in Oklahoma prisons reported such abuse. Other forms of childhood abuse and childhood neglect provided similar findings. For emotional abuse, 11% of the general public reported experiencing it in childhood versus 64.5% for the sample of women prisoners; for physical abuse, 28% of the general public reported it compared to 49.8% of the prison population; for emotional abuse, it was 15% for the public and 69.4% for the inmates; and, lastly, for physical neglect, 10% of women in the general public reported experiencing it in childhood versus 46.5% for the sample of women prisoners. Consistent with the feminist pathways perspective, females who report being mistreated in childhood are seemingly far more likely to end up in prison...."

http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2013/05/21/childhood-maltreatment-and-adult-offending-a-look-at-female-inmates-in-the-u-s/