Our thanks to Mike for this. It’s the same old story. Women aren’t held properly accountable for their crimes.
There are about 81,000 men in British prisons, and fewer than 4,000 women. The government is more concerned with reducing the number of female prisoners than male prisoners. It’s not just the government. The National Lottery Fund recently handed a grant of £1.2 million to the Prison Reform Trust to pursue the objective of reducing the number of women in prison.
As William Collins pointed out in an impressive piece, if men were treated as leniently as women in sentencing terms, five out of six men in British prisons wouldn’t be there. The male prison population would fall by around 68,000 to about 13,000. There, the prison overcrowding crisis solved at a stroke, by introducing gender equality. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong sort of gender equality.
