To expand women's prisons is idiotic and inhumane. We should phase them out
Does aspiring to equality mean treating people equally or differently? This is a question that has long divided right and left.
The right would wish away structural discrimination: treat everyone the same when it comes to the workplace or the education system and the people who deserve to flourish will; no matter that the biggest impediment to women’s careers is going part-time after having a baby, or that young black men in London have grown up in a society where they are 19 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police. The left recognises that equal treatment might not be enough to overcome deep-seated structural disadvantage.
The equalities minister, Liz Truss, has emphasised how much the government is of the former view. “Too often, the equality debate has been dominated by those who believe people are defined by their protected characteristic and not by their individual character,” she said in a much-trailed speech at the end of last year.
Perhaps this explains why ministers last month abruptly shredded a decadelong political consensus that we should be phasing out women’s prisons for all but the most dangerous offenders. A 2006 review by Baroness Corston that argued that the majority of women should be diverted to probationary support in the community has served as cross-party accepted wisdom. Numbers have bounced up and down since then – and there are still twice as many women in prison as there were 30 years ago – but at least the intentions were good. That’s no longer the case: the government has announced that it will be spending £150m to create 500 new prison places for women.
Prisons are a case in point for the different treatment of men and women. There are far too many minor offenders serving short prison sentences that increase reoffending rates and draw people into more serious crime. But women are failed particularly badly by a system that treats them as if they were men.
Prison sentences are most appropriate for dangerous and violent crimes. And the vast majority of those – including murder and sex offences – are committed by men. Men are far more violent than women, and always have been. This leaves a small but significant women’s prison estate that sustains itself on a diet of petty crimes: shoplifting, fraud and minor drug offences. Women are far more likely to be criminalised than men for non-payment of a television licence, or when their children refuse to go to school.
Female patterns of criminality cannot be divorced from male violence. So much male violence is directed at women: the vast majority of victims of sustained domestic abuse are women. Two-thirds of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse; over half experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse during their childhood. Not every female criminal is a victim. But coercive abusive relationships can serve to draw women into crime; half of women in prison have committed an offence in order to support someone else’s drug habit. At the extreme end, women who kill their abusive partners in self-defence, after enduring years of physical violence and psychological torture with little help from the authorities, so often get long sentences for murder and manslaughter convictions while abusive men who kill women get shorter custodial sentences when they plead loss of control.
Women’s prisons are filled with people who should not be there: not just abuse survivors, but those with serious mental health and addiction issues who have never been able to get the help they need and have found their way into the prison system via repeated minor offences. More than three in five are serving sentences of less than six months. And the deepest injustice of all is the impact on children. We live in a society where mothers are still overwhelmingly the primary carers; women still represent the bulk of single parents. The vast majority of children get uprooted from their homes when their mother goes to prison: either taken into care, or sent to live with relatives.
Take the case of Sarah (not her real name), who works with the criminal justice charity Revolving Doors. Her first brush with the criminal justice system came at age 13. She was arrested in her late 20s, but while on bail accessed support for her substance abuse and to leave her abusive relationship. She started volunteering and was offered a job. Social services warned that a prison sentence would have detrimental impacts on her children. But despite all this, she was given an 18-month custodial sentence and her children had to move to live with extended family. “It turned the kids’ world upside down,” she tells me. “It caused a lot of resentment from my older daughter, who felt abandoned. I would have stuck to any conditions in the community – house arrest, curfew, whatever – as long as I could have kept my children from being destabilised.”
The government’s answer? To bring more children to sleep the night with their mother in prison. That’s only an answer if you want to normalise prison for children.
So how does the government justify expanding women’s prisons? It says that the extra places are needed because an extra 20,000 police officers will lead to more female arrests. There’s so much wrong with this logic it’s hard to know where to start. Why would these officers be going after women for shoplifting and not paying their television licence (which together make up 64% of female convictions) rather than serious crimes such as the sexual exploitation of children that have been significantly affected by police underresourcing over the past decade? Why is the government switching from its stated policy of encouraging the courts to divert women away from prison and towards community sentences?
Charities that work with female offenders have been left scratching their heads. I wonder if ministers, in their rush to see people as people, not protected characteristics, simply forgot that female offenders are so very different to their male counterparts.
I’d love to live in a world where we can treat men and women as people, and that’s the end of it. However, that would be a world where male violence is no more prevalent than female violence; where men play the same role in childcare as women. The very nature of our patriarchal society, in which two women a week are killed by their violent male partners, means the feminist analysis that women must be treated as women – perhaps seen as old-fashioned by some – has never been more relevant.
Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
Prison is most appropriate for dangerous and violent crimes and the vast majority of those are committed by men