It is clear from criminal statistics that cautioning is used more heavily for female than male offenders although this seems to be mainly based on the less serious and less frequent nature of female offending.
Women’s entry into policing was promoted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries precisely to provide protection to female and juvenile offenders and victims which it was felt they did not receive from an all male force (Carrier, 1988; Feinman, 1986). Very little work has been done to demonstrate whether female officers treat female offenders in distinctive ways and some studies report women as being more punitive towards their own sex (Worrall, 1990).
Women and Sentencing
Women are generally assumed to be sentenced more leniently than men often attributed to a chivalrous attitude on the part of sentencers who may assume that a woman’s crime is more likely to be related to mental illness or medical problems and therefore be reluctant to send women to prison especially when they have children.
Recent Home Office studies found women are far less likely than men to receive a custodial sentence for virtually all indictable offences except drugs. When women do receive prison sentences they tend to be shorter than men’s, they are less likely to be dealt with at the Crown Court, women are less likely to receive prison sentences irrespective of the number of previous offences.
Although some people feel that the evidence points to more lenient treatment of women, Mary Eaton found that courts tended to look carefully at female offenders’ family and domestic situations which may lead to the effect of more indirect forms of differentiation, reflecting notions of the “ideal” woman, related to family and domestic considerations.
On the other hand, people have argued that women may be more harshly dealt with by courts as female offenders may be seen as doubly deviant - deviant as offenders and deviant as women. Several observers have stressed that concern over the anomalous position of deviant women leads to excessive zeal in their treatment, and remands in custody for reports and more medicalised interventions (Hedenson, 1981; Edwards, 1984). Such approaches are particularly marked towards young girls whose minor sexual misdemeanours seem to be consistently more harshly handled than those of boys (Chesney-Lind, Parker et al, 1981; Webb, 1984; Cain, 1989).
Courts appear to use the full range of the tariff less for women than for men; one-fifth of adultery male offenders are the subject of probation orders, very few receive community service orders and the use of fines has declined while discharges are used more widely.
The proposal of systematic chivalric bias is supported by Allen’s study (1997) which showed violent women offenders receiving more sympathetic and individualised justice for serious crimes although other British researchers have found a more complex pattern in which courts appear to have a somewhat conventional and stereotyped view of gender roles which they then reinforce with conviction and sentencing.
Eaton (1986) noted that men and women conforming to conventional rules were better treated than those such as homosexuals or single mothers and pointed out that women were supposed to take much more responsibility for home-making and for domestic morality. Carlen (1983) also found Scottish Sheriffs distinguishing between “good” and “bad” mothers and being prepared to sentence them accordingly. In the United States Daly (1989) found that it was children and the family rather than women themselves who were the focus of chivalry or judicial “paternalism” as the courts seek to support and conserve the fabric of society.
Women and Prison
The numbers of women in prison are small at any one time (about 1,800-2,000 during the 1990s) and form a very small percentage of the total population in prison (30:1). Many women in prison are there as untried or unsentenced prisoners, and it has been argued, since many of the former are not subsequently imprisoned, that women are subject to punitive remands (Heidensohn, 1985).
In England and Wales women constitute under 2,000 of prisoners at any one time out of some 50,000. In central systems such as France and the United Kingdom, they are concentrated in larger units and are often removed from family and friends (Cario, 1985; Hedenson, 1991).
Following the failure of a few initiatives, Zedner points out that when women are the subject of special penal treatment, it frequently results in the development of benevolently repressive regimes for them and fails to provide skills which could aid rehabilitation. Additionally such programmes tend to be determined by assumed characteristics and needs of women rather than well explored evidence. A recent example of this is the re-building of Holloway Prison for women in Britain during the 1970s on the assumption that women offenders were physically or mentally sick or both but it was finally deemed to have an unsatisfactory design and lack of adequate psychiatric facilities (Carlen, 1985; Badel & Stevenson, 1988; Rock, 1996). Women in prison are less likely to receive good education, training and job opportunities and more likely to have to carry out domestic tasks with the notion that they need additional pressures to conform and be rehabilitated (Carlen, 1983; Dobash & Dobash, 1986).
In Britain women perceive the pains of imprisonment as harsher and react with much greater vehemence against them (Hedenson, 1975 and 1980; Casale, 1989; Mandaraka-Shepherd, 1986; Carlen, 1985) and a higher proportion are charged with disciplinary offences, doses of tranquillisers prescribed are higher and there is a significant incidence of self-mutilation.
In summary, women’s experiences of the whole of the criminal justice system is rife with contradiction and several writers have suggested that especially the police transfer their low evaluation of women as victims to women as offenders and respond to them as women and thus as inferior (Jones, 1987; Dunhill, 1989) .
Much of the sense of injustice felt by women who come before the courts stems from their perceptions of such agencies as male dominated and unsympathetic (Hedenson, 1986; Scutt, 1981). However, the attitudes of courts are by no means consistent and vary according to the age, ethnic background, social class and whether a woman has herself been a victim (Schlesinger et al, 1992). Reviewing the considerable body of work on women’s experiences in prison reveals diversity, complexity and sometimes contradiction.
Clearly there are certain gender specific forms of discrimination rife in the administration of justice and the structures in which it operates. It raises queries about unstated patriarchal values and has led to spirited calls for new approaches to justice (Klein, 1995). Dobash and Dobash put it that it is impossible to use the law and legal apparatus to confront patriarchal domination and oppression when the language and procedures of these social processes and institutions are saturated with patriarchal beliefs and structures (1992).
Arguments both about chivalry afforded to women and about their being, under some circumstances, more punitively dealt with, have been discussed in modern academic and popular
debate (Kennedy, 1992).
Evidence on the topic is however patchy and conclusions are necessarily tentative but seem to indicate the need for a systematic approach. Issues of justice are hard to resolve and come down to whether it should be the offender or the offence that provides the primary focus.
It is certainly true that females fit awkwardly if at all into most parts of the criminal justice system and present puzzles and problems to it.
REFERENCES
Maguire .M.,Morgan.R. & Reiner R.:Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2nd Ed)
Oxford University Press;1997
Gunn, J. & Taylor, P.J.; Forensic Psychiatry;
Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd., 1993.
