Uniform Crime Report

According to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) (1960 - 1995), which is the official arrest statistics, both males and females are tend to be arrested because of less serious offenses. The five most common arrest categories are other except traffic, driving under the influence (DUI), larceny-theft, drug abuse, and other assaults. While arrests for serious crimes like murder, arson, and embezzlement are rare for both males and females. The pattern of change is similar for both sexes as well. These 35 years have witnessed large increases in larceny-theft, fraud, DUI, drug violations, and assault in both male and female crimes. Similarly, the decreases in drunkenness, sex offenses, vagrancy, suspicion, and gambling are witnessed in both sexes. As
Compared to males, females are far more likely to be involved in minor property crimes (25 percent of female arrests versus 12 percent of male arrests). While males always have relatively higher involvement in the serious crimes (16 percent of male arrests versus 6 percent of female arrests). The minor property crimes such as larceny-theft and fraud, and substance abuse like DUI and alcohol issues are the most usual reasons that females are arrested. Female share of arrests is always higher for the minor property crimes and low for “masculine” crimes. Moreover, this female percentage of arrests for minor property crimes had an obvious increase from 17 percent (1960) to 27 percent (1980) to 35 percent (1995). At the same time, most other crimes only showed slightly increases, some of them even declined (Steffensmeier and Allan, 2000). Females are less likely to be involved in violent crimes compared with males. Though involved, females tend to commit less serious crime, have less offender culpability and commit offences in private settings and against intimates (Schwartz, Steffensmeier, and Feldmeyer, 2009). Females less likely show commitment to criminal behavior, they usually started and quite earlier than those of males, and they are less likely to repeat violent crimes (Steffensmeier and Allan,
When the policy changes, especially regarding to what behavior need to be defined to be the crime, the crime trend may have distinct change accordingly. The literature suggests this issue is especially obvious in female crime trend. Three sets of net-widening changes in Criminal Justice policy in recent years, namely 1) the inclusion of minor forms of violence, 2) the legal changes criminalizing violence between intimates, and 3) the more gender-neutral of law enforcement, has increased the females’ arrest vulnerability nowadays. This resulted in the national rise in female crimes, especially violent crime arrests in the official arrest data (Schwartz, Steffensmeier, and Feldmeyer,