If prison isn’t for the posh, why should it be for the poor?
OXFORD MEDICAL STUDENT LAVINIA WOODWARD SHOULDN’T BE THE POSTER GIRL FOR POSH, WHITE WOMEN GETTING BANGED UP. VICKY ALLAN SAYS HER CASE SHOULD BE A REMINDER OF WHY WE NEED JUSTICE REFORM
IT’S easy to be outraged by the court case of Lavinia Woodward, the Oxford medical student who punched and stabbed her boyfriend with a bread knife while under the influence of drugs. The judge, who has deferred sentence, said she would probably not be going to prison and described her as an “extraordinary able young lady”. He expressed a desire not to prevent her from “following her long-held desire to enter the profession she wishes to”.
What could be a more troubling indictment of the way our culture favours the few over the many, the elite over the rest, than an Oxford student walking free following a stabbing? It’s not surprising that Twitter went wild over Woodward’s case.
We learned little more than the fact that her barrister had said she had struggled with drug addiction and been abused by a former partner. “Is this the rise of punishment by merit?” wrote Verity Ryan in The Telegraph. “Only those with the least talent and potential should suffer the inconvenience of paying for their crimes.”
Yet perhaps commentators were focusing on the wrong issue. There was outrage that Woodward had been allowed to walk free. But the bigger question was whether others, from more deprived backgrounds, were getting the same kinds of consideration for their futures.
The judge was giving Woodward a chance. When he deferred sentencing, he took advantage of a mechanism by which the defendant can be observed post-conviction to see if they are making genuine efforts at rehabilitation.
And we do need to give people a chance. Woodward is being processed by the English criminal justice system, which shares a problem with our own: the UK has the highest prison population in Europe.
A recent Prison Reform Trust report on the shockingly high levels of female imprisonment in Scotland observed: “An over-reliance on remand and on short custodial sentences which fail to tackle the underlying causes of offending, continues to draw women into the criminal justice system and keep them there.”
What this tells us is that too few people are being given a chance, that too often prison is being used as a holding space for vulnerable people who are themselves at risk.
The problem is not that we’re failing to throw posh, violent, white women with drug issues into prison, it’s that too many people from less privileged backgrounds are ending up there for similar, or less grave, crimes.
Last year, the Lammy Review into the treatment of ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system in England and Wales published research showing that ethnic minorities were more likely than white people to get prison sentences.
Would Woodward have received a deferred sentence if she’d been a Somalian refugee, struggling to raise a son and study to be a nurse while suffering from mental health problems as a result of PTSD?
That was the situation Zoe, a young woman I met a few months ago, had been in when she was remanded in Cornton Vale to await trial for assault. Zoe received a community-based sentence, but not before she’d already spent three weeks in prison, during which time she lost her home, her potential career, and her son into foster care.
Critics of the Woodward judgment are right: this is about class and race inequality. But that doesn’t mean the judge was wrong to suggest a way in which Woodward might avoid a prison sentence.
Woodward is a reminder of why we still need to push for further justice reform, and more services to address problems like poor mental health, and drug and alcohol use.
Lavinia Woodward shouldn’t be the poster girl for making sure posh, white women get banged up.
Rather, she should be a reminder of why, in so many cases, ethnic minorities, the poor and those with mental health issues and drug dependencies should not.