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.
If you’d like email notifications of our new blog pieces, please enter your email address in the box near the top of the right-hand column and click ‘Subscribe’.
We shall shortly be posting this piece on our X channel.
Our YouTube channel is here.
