In the past thirty years, women and crime has become a major intellectual and professional specialty. The Crimes Women Commit: The Punishments They Receive represents the third edition of Women in Crime, a classic in the field by Rita J. Simon first published in 1975. This revised and updated edition takes advantage of the fact that women are more represented in official crime statistics today than they have been at any time since systemic national data has been available.

Rita J. Simon and Heather Ahn-Redding present the most current demographic data and updates of the arrest, conviction, and prison statistics reported in the first and second editions as they examine issues such as women's labor force participation, the percentage of female-headed households in which women are the caretakers of young children, as well as trends in how female crime statistics are reported. This classic text will become an essential tool for teachers and researchers within criminology and criminal justice, and among the subfields within sociology, psychology, and economics, where research on women who commit crimes has grown into a major area of interest.