Women and Punishment Flashcards
(Carlen, 2013: 4)
‘…women just do not commit so much crime as men and the crimes they commit are physically less dangerous and socially less injurious.’
(Carlen, 2013) •Battle vs men’s establishment
Argues that disadvantageous differences affecting women stem from repeated losses suffered by women’s institutions in battles with men’s establishments.
(Corcoran, 2011: 26) explains that:
‘Gender mainstreaming has exerted some influence insofar as official discourse now generally acknowledges the need for distinctly gender-focused approaches to offenders and prisoners.’
(Ministry of Justice, 2016)
“We know… that many female offenders are often vulnerable members of society. There is evidence that a specific approach is most effective in helping women to address the issues that may be underlining their offending and to turn their lives around.”
(Scott and Codd, 2010:34)
Note that
Prison is a masculinity punishment
(Caddie and Crisp, 1997) discovered in their research that:
This is compounded upon by (Büllow, 2013) who notes that:
Children with imprisoned mothers are much more likely to suffer from afflictions stemming from this including issues with making friends, eating disorders, bed wetting, insomnia and becoming withdrawn.
Moreover (Büllow argues that from both a deontological and consequentialist perspective, the effect of incarceration of a parent in their children is not morally permissible and that prison should be a last resort.
(Völlm and Dolan, 2009)
Cross sectional study of 638 women of two female prisons in the north west UK discovered that:
“Nearly half of the women had a history of self-harm and suicide attempts and for about half of those the onset of these behaviours post-dated their imprisonment.” A significant amount of the prisoners had not been noticed by the risk assessment procedures of the prisons that should deal with this issue.
(Simpson and McNulty, 2008) argue that:
Drug services in UK prisons must be adjusted to meet the specific needs of women.
(Langan and Pelissier, 2001) notes that: - link to (Ramsay, 2003) then (Home Office Social Exclusion Unit, 2002)
Drug treatment in prison is most often based upon the needs of white makes that have abused opiates.
Research by (Caddle and Crisp, 1997) found that:
Women in prison, although only constituting 5% of the overall E + W prison population, account for 26% of all self harm cases.
(Blunt, 2010) argues that the solution to some problems of women in prisons in E + W is to:
Increase the length of sentences that are given to women.
(Holloway and Bennett, 2007)
Drug misuse among women
From a sample of 2682 men and 453 women across 16 custody suites in 13 police force areas across England and Wales, it was revealed that the female arrestees were more likely to use cocaine and heroine at a high rate, with 31% of women compared to 18% of men interviewed being dependent on the former at some point before incarceration, and 81% of women compared to 67% of men being dependent on the latter at some point before incarceration.
