Women In Prisons

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Women are doubly punished for their crime and for their gender

“Women offenders have been doubly punished by penal regimes; firstly for the social offence of their criminal acts and secondly, for the transgressions against the home-centred submissiveness and passitivity that the dominant gender order has required of respectable femininity.”

It is evident that women in prison are more victims than criminals due to their situation outside of prison, however they appear to be doubly punished, once for the crime they have committed and secondly for being a woman, as it does not fulfil the common attributes associated with the gender, thus meaning a harsher treatment usually follows.

Women are understood to be more victims of situation than …show more content…

As all short sentences do is limit the opportunities of women, in work for instance, thus putting women in a worse off situation than they were in before. The Justice Select Committee concluded that over 60% of women offenders receive ineffective short-custodial sentences for crimes, which would not ordinarily get prison time . Compared to men of whom only 20% get sentences of under 6months . Lady Corston said she agreed that the "overwhelming majority" of women prisoners "should not be there because they are troubled rather than troublesome" . This illustrates that women are more likely to get prison time than their male counterparts purely due to their failing to meet the gender stereotype not crime. This means alternatives might be more prudent something which MSP Sandra White strongly believes commenting “at the moment prisons lock women away with no help whatsoever to find out where their problems have come from “ . Lord Bingham stated in 2005 that punishment in the community should be the normal punishment for women for which custody is not strictly necessary as it would be more beneficial in producing law abiding citizens . This alternative is seen to be better as the punishment can be tailored to the crime and person. For instance if the female offender has a mental health problem, a treatment order can be attached to the generic sentence, treating the issue instead of punishing it because of perceptions of

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