Meda Chesney-Lind

Meda Chesney-Lind is a US feminist, criminologist, and an advocate for girls and women who come in contact with the criminal justice system in Hawaii.

Overview

Chesney-Lind works to find alternatives to women's incarceration and is an advocate for humanitarian solutions within the Hawaiian criminal justice system. She focuses on teaching courses on girls' delinquency and women's crime, issues of girls' programming and women's imprisonment, youth gangs, the sociology of gender, and the victimization of women and girls. Over much of the past two decades, her focus has been on improvement of the Hawaiian correctional system through producing articles for newspapers, books, and journals, as well as working with community-based agencies and giving talks to local organizations and legislators. She has also been credited with helping to direct national attention to services for delinquent girls.

Early life

Meda Chesney was born in Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1947 and was the oldest of four children. She grew up in Maryland and moved to Portland, Oregon at the age of 16. She graduated valedictorian from high school in 1965. She then attended Whitman College where she met Ian Lind. They married in 1969 and moved to his home in Hawaii.

Education

Chesney-Lind received her B.A. in 1969 from Whitman College and both her M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1977) from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

She is an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, professor emerita of the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a senior research fellow at Portland State University.

Research projects and grants

Chesney-Lind has received various grants to fund research projects and initiatives, ranging from $6,000 - $422,121. She was the principal investigator for Hawaii's Youth Gang Response Evaluation (YGRE). Chesney-Lind received over $700,000 in increments between 1992 and 2005 for the project, which centered on interviews and analysis with current youth gang members, research on delinquency, and gang members of youth at risk in Hawaii. She also received a contract for a three-year pilot project (2003-2004), for which she was granted almost $40,000 to provide evaluation services to the Family Drug Court (first circuit) in the state of Hawaii. Chesney-Lind has also been granted $15,000 to provide evaluation services to the Family Court's pilot project of developing a "girls' court." This court intends to address female delinquents with a history of offending on the island of Oahu.

Awards

Chesney-Lind has received a number of awards including;

• The University of Hawaii Board Of Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research
• In 1996, the American Society of Criminology named her a Fellow.
• The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences' Bruce Smith, Sr. Award
• The Distinguished Scholar Award from the Women and Crime Division of the American Society of Criminology
• The Division of Critical Criminology's "Major Achievement Award"
• The Herbert Block Award for service to the society and the profession from the American Society of Criminology
• The Donald Cressey Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in 1997 for her outstanding academic contribution to the field of criminology.

Bibliography (partial)

• Bowker, L.H., (1978). Women, crime and the criminal justice system. Lexington, Massachusetts.: Lexington Books. (Contributions by Meda Chesney-Lind and Joy Pollock).
• Brown, L.M., Chesney-Lind, M. & Stein, N., (2007). Patriarchy matters: Toward a gendered theory of teen violence and victimization. Violence Against Women. 13, pages 1249–1273.
• Chesney-Lind, M., (1997). The female offender: Girls, women and crime. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
• Chesney-Lind, M., (2001). What about the girls? Delinquency programming as if gender mattered. Corrections Today. pages 38-45.
• Chesney-Lind, Meda and Nikki Jones (eds).(2010). Fighting for Girls: Critical Perspectives on Gender and Violence. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. In press.
• Chesney-Lind, Meda, (2006). Patriarchy, crime, justice: Feminist criminology in an era of backlash. Feminist Criminology. 1(1), pages 6-26.
• Chesney-Lind, M., (2007). Beyond bad girls: Feminist perspectives on female offending in The Blackwell companion to criminology (Sumner, C. & Chambliss, W.J., eds). Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
• Chesney-Lind, M. & Eliason, M., (2006). From invisible to incorrigible: The demonization of marginalized women and girls. Crime, Media, Culture. 2(1), pages 29-47.
• Chesney-Lind, M. & Hagedorn, J.M., (eds.) (1998). Female gangs in America: Essays on gender, and gangs. Lakeview Press.
• Chesney-Lind, M. & Irwin, K., (2008). Beyond bad girls: Gender, violence and hype. New York: Rutledge.
• Chesney-Lind, M., Morash, M. & Irwin, K., (2007). Policing girlhood? Relational aggression and violence prevention. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. 5(3), pages 328-345.
• Chesney-Lind, M., Morash, M. & Stevens, T., (2008). Girls' troubles, girls' delinquency, and gender responsive programming: A review. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology. 41 (1), pages 162-189.
• Chesney-Lind, M. & Pasko, L. (eds.), (2004a). Girls, women and crime: Selected readings. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.
• Chesney-Lind, M. & Pasko, L., (2004b). The female offender: Girls, women and crime (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.
• Chesney-Lind, M. & Shelden, R.G., (1998). Girls, delinquency, and juvenile justice (2nd ed.). Belmont, California: West/Wadsworth.
• Davidson, S., (ed.), (1982). Justice for young women: Close-up on critical issues. Tucson, Arizona: New Directions for Young Women, inc. (Introduction by Meda Chesney-Lind).
• Gavazzi, S.M., Yarcheck, C.M. & Chesney-Lind, M., (2006). Global risk indicators and the role of gender in a juvenile detention sample. Criminal Justice and Behaviour. 33(5), pages 597-612.
• Mauer, M. & Chesney-Lind, M., (eds.) (2002). Invisible Punishment: The collateral consequences of mass imprisonment. New York: New Press.