This chapter traces the emergence of the multifaceted discipline of criminology. It examines the trajectory of its growth and emergence as a discipline side by side with the development of the modern prison system. Most of the research in the last few decades of the previous century and the first two decades of this century has identified domestic factors ranging from maladjustment in the family to deprivation of love and care to bad habits of the husbands as the reasons and causes of female crime. However, these theories are all quantitatively poor as well as qualitatively deficient. It is true that there are many constraints in studying women criminals. But they have to be studied as the numbers of female criminals keep increasing day by day. Research on women criminals is too fragmented in nature, scope and coverage, and lacking in academic expression. The following chapters will be an attempt to try and bring about some clarity to the understanding of the crime problem in the Indian context by analysing primary data. They will try to use a radical and deconstructive framework that will challenge criminologists to rethink what they mean by everyday concepts we take for granted—‘crime’, the ‘offender’, the ‘victim’, the criminal justice system and the idea of ‘justice’—legal justice, social justice, restorative justice.