Out in the storm : drug-addicted women living as shoplifters and sex workers /

Caputo, a criminologist at Rutgers University, makes a worthy contribution to the literature of female crime and addictions with this qualitative interview study of 38 mostly minority women from metropolitan Philadelphia. At the time of the research, informants lived in county jail facilities or in a halfway house. By gaining respondents' trust, Caputo was able to elicit meaningful portrayals of how these women managed to pursue their occupations as shoplifters or sex workers (and avoid detection by the police) as they sought to maintain their drug-using life-styles. Caputo's mastery of criminological literature is most complete, enabling her to integrate her findings meaningfully within the framework of previous research. Her analysis is less successful when she tries to reconstruct how her informants progressed from their mostly traumatic early childhoods into adult lives of crime and drug use. Retrospective recall problems abound in any cross-sectional study like the present one. Nevertheless, serious students of female crime and addictions will find much new and valuable material in this work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. W. Feigelman Nassau Community College