The Impact of Gender, Offense Type, and Familial Role on the Decision to Incarcerate Tina L. Freiburger Published online: 4 June 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract This study attempts to further the understanding of how familial roles affect male and females’ sentences. In accordance with familial paternalism theory, the effects of familial roles presenting different levels of social costs and control were examined for drug and property offenders. The findings show that living with a child or paying child support reduced defendants’ odds of incarceration. Once familial role variables were included in the model, gender was not a significant predictor of odds of incarceration. When split models for gender and offense type were examined, females and property offenders had a reduced likelihood of being incarcerated if they were caretakers to children. Interaction effects, however, found that the impacts did not differ significantly for males and females or for property and drug offenders. Keywords Sentencing disparity Á Gender Á Familial paternalism In the United States, the War on Drugs is believed to have had an especially negative effect on the female offender. With harsher sentences for such crimes as possession and delivery, more females have entered the criminal justice system in recent years than ever before. In fact, the rate of female incarceration has virtually doubled since 1980 (Greenfield & Snell, 1999). This increased rate of incarceration has led Chesney-Lind (1991) to argue that the War on Drugs has become the ‘‘war on women,’’ especially minority women. She has further argued that the rate of female incarceration can be attributed to a shift in sentencing practices, with women receiving sentences similar to sentences given to men. The high rate of female drug offenders being incarcerated seems to support this argument. T. L. Freiburger (&) Department of Criminal Justice, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, P.O. Box 786, 1139 Enderis Hall, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA e-mail: freiburg@uwm.edu 123 Soc Just Res (2011) 24:143–167 DOI 10.1007/s11211-011-0133-8