A Feminist Theory of Delinquency

The situation of Donna Hylton is as rare as it is tragic. To hear her voice on the podcast Decarcerated, one knows that she refuses the status of the victim role. At the same time, she was a victim in so many ways. On a sociological level, one can only see the star student reduced to the level of an accomplice, largely from being so ahead of her peers. On the level of criminal justice, one has to reckon with the facts that was imprisoned for 27 years, on account of having been judged complicit in a murder. When Hylton was sentenced, she wasn’t more than 20 years old. And as she relates in Decarcerated, the span of time allotted as her punishment was something she could not experientially conceive.

Apart from questions of guilt or innocence, the story of Hylton resolves around questions of persona choice. And it’s in reference to questions of personal choice that one can detect in her voice, attitude, philosophy, the sad life of a felon who has spent the bulk of her life in prison. Part and parcel of being a prisoner is the acknowledgement of guilt, of knowing that one has done wrong. Hylton acknowledges this everywhere when she speaks. She acknowledges that she has made bad decisions, and admits that she committed certain irrevocable actions that she could just as easily – perhaps even with less expenditure of effort not have commited.

Some words should be devoted regarding the person Hylton is responsible for having killed. According to a contemporary New York Times article, Hylton’s victim was 60-year-old Thomas Vigliarolo. The article outlines the fact that he had already been considered missing since the 20th of March (1985). This article also mentions the ransom that was put on Vigliarolo’s head: a total sum of $435,000. The article goes on to note those charged with the kidnapping and murder of Vigliarolo: Selma Price, Rita Peters, Donna Hylton, Maria Talag, Woodie George Pace, Louis Miranda, and Angeles Marlano. This last fact is especially important, in that it shows that Hylton was, to her great misfortune, something of a victim of circumstance in her own right. She did not act alone. And just as in her life her decisions were to some extent prefabricated due to the contingencies of her birth (race and class being especially important factors), her culpability in an almost conspiratorial murder charge has since come to be disputed. Nonetheless, the charges were placed against her, and she pled guilty.

The first part of Hylton’s memoir A Little Piece of Light is especially important in regards to how she was always inculcated by the society around her, which includes even the familial dynamic which raised her. Detailing years of abuse, her memoir claims that practically every male figure in her life was someone who could not be trusted. In effect, Donna Hylton was constantly trying to find refuge from the very parental figures she should have been able to trust. As a primary document about her abusive childhood, this text offers an invaluable for insight into Hylton’s case. One should note that the people Hylton was engaged with around the time of Vigliarolo’s death were very much older than her. In other words, she was seeking a parental, authority figure in from the kind of society she had been exposed to. A better than average student, Hylton looked up to a particular math teacher she had known through babysitting. The relationship that developed from this would prove her undoing, so far as being a free citizen of the world goes.

But Hylton is known today more for her activism than for the conditions of her incarceration. Her present-day work includes numerous speaking tours, which not only address prison reform, but the concerns of feminism more generally. Just recently, at the age thirty-six, she came out to her own family that as a lesbian. This devastated her mother, who considered homosexuality perverse and sinful. While not related to her complicity in the crimes she was accused of, her identity as a lesbian furthers her claims that she was motivated to seek out a community beyond that offered by her peers on account of feelings of alienation.

Having given an overview of Donna Hylton’s life, we should move forward to examine some of the theories that would account for her criminal behavior. Whatever the circumstances that might have caused Donna Hylton to act how she did, she is nonetheless culpable for the murder of Thomas Vigliarolo. O much she has admitted to. But why? Can we look for answers other than the circumstantial descriptions Donna Hylton gives regarding her own story.

Author Meda Chesney-Lind asks, “Who is the typical female delinquient? What causes her to get into trouble? What happens to her if she is caught? These are questions that few members of the general public could answer quickly”. What Chesney-Lind means by this statement is, primarily, that it’s more ingrained in the public mind that males, and boys specifically, are delinquients. The reality of delinquinency among young firls is not so wel accounted for. As Chesney-Lind views it, though, status offenses are what girls are statistically likely to be referred to the courts for: offenses like trauancy, running away from home, even consensual statutory rape, which applies in Donna Hylton’s case.

Following Chesney-Lind theorizing, one should take into consideration what she terms a feminist theory of delinquency. Defined in her words; “A feminist approach to delinquency means constructions of explanations of femal behavior that are sensitive to its patriarchal context. Feminist analysis of delinquency would also examine ways in which social agencies of control – the police, the courts, and the prisons – act in ways to reinforce women’s place in male society”. Otherwise stated, gender stratification in a patriarchal society is as powerful a system as class. How would such a theory apply to Donna Hylton’s story?

We need to review Donna Hylton’s story, keeping in a mind a remark made by Dorie Klein, who commented that authors like Freud and Konopka view female delinquency as “blocked access or maladjustment to the normal feminine role” (375). This kind of normalizing interpretation can be so reductive as to be outright racist, even to the point os attributing “high rates of delinquency among black girls to their lack of ‘healthy’ feminine narcisicim”. As the present writer sees the matter, the circumstances of Donna Hylton’s upbringing lead her to see an alternative route the realization of her femininity.

This perspective accords with a feminist theory of delinquency. To evidence the theory, one has to take account of the patriarchal influence on the circumstances of Donna Hylton’s crimes. One notes, for instance, that Thomas Vigliarole was a 62-year-old, a real-estate broker and con man. He became targeted by one of Hylton’s accomplices Louis Miranda, only after he came to believe that Vigliarole had swindled him out of $139,000 in a real estate con. It was by way of Miranda’s influence that Hylton became involved in the conspiracy. A woman named Maria Talag, who according to Donna called Miranda her godfather, invited Donna and two friends, Rita and Theresa, to participate in the crime. Their cut was to be $9,000 each. Ultimately, Donna wanted hers to pay for a picture portfolio to help her break into modeling.

The patriarchal influences on Donna Hylton’s situation are undeniable. All the women in the case — including Donna herself, in light of her early abusive childhood – are brought together by the coercion of the men in their lives. What’s more Vigliarole believed that Donna and her two friends, Rita and Theresa, were prostitutes. Instead, they picked him up on March 8 in Elmhurst, Queens, at Maria’s home, and drugged him to make him drowsy. Then they drove him to in Harlem, where he was was starved, burned, beaten, sodomized, and genitally tortured. According to the detective who arrested and interviewed the suspects, “ They’d squeezed the victim’s testicles with a pair of pliers, beat him, burned him”. What motivates such behavior? Even torture has a psychological meaning; and in Donna Hylton’s case the kind of torture she inflicted on Vigliarole, and the character of her role in the crime, can help to evidence the particulars of her case from a feminist theory of delinquency.

In ths case of Donna Hylton, a feminist theory of delinquency overlaps with what Travis Hirschi calls constrol theory. According to Hirchi, “control theory assumes the existence of a common value system within the society or group whose norms are being violated. If the deviant is commited to a value system different from that of conventional society, there is within the context of the theory, nothing to explain” (325). Donna Hylton’s value system is, of course, that of a young woman imposed on by patriarchal society. In A little piece of light: A memoir of hope, prison, and a life unbound, Donna Hylton details how she was abused emotionally, physically, and sexually by every single person who crossed her path during her childhood and young adult years. When the reades gets to the part referencing her crime, she downplays and avoids responsibility. Why? Because, as with everything else in her life, she is the victim here. Her crime was not one of passion. She did not kill her abuser(s). She claims that past trauma made her vulnerable and led to her part in torture and murder. Abuse victims will sometimes go on to abuse others; and this should be a clue to understanding Hylton’s case from a feminist perspective.

A feminist account of Donna Hylton’s case will have to red between the lines of so-called factual descriptions of her crime, which are riddled with sympathy for her victime rather than addressing the factual and social circumstances that lead up to the the killing. In the NY Times article puclished APRIL 8, 1985, one reads: Seven people were in custody yesterday on charges of second-degree murder and kidnapping in connection with the death of a Long Island real- estate broker whose body was found locked in a trunk in a Manhattan apartment Saturday. The police said the victim, 60-year- old Thomas Vigliarolo of Jericho, had been missing since March 20, when he left his home to meet a client in New Jersey. No mention is made of Vigliarolo’s criminal dealings; and Maria Talag, one of Vigliarolo’s executioners, is mentioned as having been a friend of Mr. Vigliarolo, along with her age.

In the teeth of the covert sympahty offered by such seemingly factual reportage, the listing of the ages of the perpertrators of the murder help to show the kind of community Hylton was engaging with: “Selma Price, 46, of that address; Rita Peters, 20, and Donna Hilton, 20, both of the Bronx; Maria Talag, 24, of Queens, and Woodie George Pace, 40, Louis Miranda, 64, and Angeles Marlano, 62, all of Manhattan” (https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/08/nyregion/the-city-7-held-in-slaying-of-man-in-trunk.html) Give the motley congregation that Hylton was a part of, one could say that she was seeking a sense of community. As for the ravages she infliced on Vigliarolo, and it’s relationship to early circumstances of her life, Hylton herself speaks eloquently about how one’s past influences one’s future, and how what are at one point metaphoric descriptors for one’s life, can easily translate into factual circumstances: “Sexual violence forces us out of our bodies and ourselves. it lays us vulnerable to be controlled and further abused as a part as our agency is stolen from the onset. It robs us of our ‘sense of goodness’; and once that is taken, so is our confidence and vision of a future. I know in my case I became the darkness that was injected inside me. And then I lived in darkness for many years”.

Otherwise stated, it was because Hyton was sexually abused that she became a sexual abuser in turn. Along with this, a properly feminist approach to her case should take into account that Hylton discovered a sense of community through the murder of Vigliarolo. However greusone that sounds, it take into consideration more of the facts of her particular case, rather than simply condeming her for her crime, or describing it in terms of patriarchal assumptions.

This paper attempted to examine the case of Donna Hylton in terms of a feminist theory of delinquency. Using this as a lens, one came to see that Hylton’s actions were not to be explained by malevolent will, but by abuse she suffered by reason of living in a patriachal society. We also saw that this feminst theory overlaps with constrol theory, and that Hylton’s actions can be rationally accounted by the face that she cannot, insofar as she embodies feminity even ij acts of rebellion, be held subject to the ules of patriarchy.

From here, we looked at how contemporary reportage of Hylton’s crime presupposed the authority of patriarchal values, and even sugested that one should sympathize with Vigliarole more than Hylton and her accomplices (some of whom, we can imagine, were also deleteriously influenced by the men in their live). Ultimetly, this paper concluded, what Hylton sought through the actions that precipitated the death of Vigliarole was to experience a sense of community. The fact that there was such a great cleavage from her intetions and their effects rests mainly with the sexual abuse she experienced as a child.

Cite this page