Our thanks to Graham for this piece in yesterday’s Telegraph (£). The start of the piece:
“Send fewer women to prison. That’s the consensus across the political spectrum. It is part of Andy Burnham’s plan to free up prison places for men. The Conservatives have said they are sympathetic and even Colin Sutton, Reform’s newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Norfolk, advocates it. Needless to say, prison reform charities are all in favour.
Apparently enough women could safely be released to repurpose HMP Bronzefield, England’s largest women’s prison housing over 500, for male offenders.
As with anything that has become an unquestioned truth, the idea that we are locking up too many women needs to be interrogated. A strong case can be made for the opposite position: that too few women are serving custodial sentences.
There are over 87,000 prisoners in England and Wales, but only around 4 per cent or 3,500 of these are women. This is a dramatic change from times past.
According to House of Commons figures, in 1900 17 per cent of prisoners were women.”
Unfortunately I cannot leave comments because I’ve been banned permanently for breaching “community guidelines”, probably by posting pro-life comments. So I would invite followers of this blog to post comments, including a mention of the gender bias in prison sentencing being covered at length in William Collins’s The Empathy Gap. Thank you.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Here’s a radical idea – we could build more prisons.
Oh, and we could stop attempting to turn them into ghettos for white heterosexual males – concentration camps for wrongthink correction.
https://empathygap.uk/?p=4656
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There were a series of “reforms” during the middle and late 19th Century that were explicitly to reduce the female prison population. Around 1800 about a quarter of those imprisoned were women. I first discovered this decades ago when looking into the requirement for a male relative to be guarantor for loans. It turns out this was the result this was the result of lobbying from the likes of Charles Dickens. As a means of preventing women being imprisoned for debt. As of course they were prior to this “reform” , much to the disgust of high minded Victorians aghast that the fairer sex should suffer so. So along with other “progressive” legislation excluding women from dangerous industries, leniency for thefts and notions that women were easily led by male partners or confused or distracted. The female % of prison population fell particularly after 1850. In many respects the Corston Report and recent Governments’ policies to close women’s Prisons is simply a continuation of this process of protecting the “fairer sex” by presuming they aren’t morally responsible. Go back to 1800 and you find men and women actually treated as morally responsible with similarly harsh sentencing , including “transportation” for both.
At the time ,in the late 1970s I thought it ironic that feminists often cited the requirement for a male guarantor for loans (repealed in the mid 1960s) as “sexist” and holding women back. When in fact it had been a progressive reform to prevent women taking responsibility for their debts, so if anyone was to be imprisoned for debt it wouldn’t be a woman. As with many other supposedly oppressive legislation introduced because philanthropic Victorians couldn’t countenance women doing dirty/dangerous work.
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