Prison isn't working for women - can it be fixed

Why do they need to

But how can private companies make money out of that ?

Think these things through !

Prison needs to be reserved for violence and abuse ,murder ,causing injuries .
Burglary,...a lot of what people are put in prison for could be delt with by community service, putting back in to the community..and curfew,more use of ankle tags .

Yes, this.

Also, I seem to recall there's some research, but it might be US-led, that often these relatively petty crimes that women are over punished for, are often directly as the result of poverty, caring responsibilities and/or abusive relationships - shoplifting food for example.

Thanks for the Malcolm Gladwell quote, RethinkingLife. That makes the point - and illustrates the dilemma - very nicely.

I think that the problems relating to men and women in prison are different from each other, though there is some overlap. There are far fewer women in prison, for a start, so it's easier to treat them as a homogenous group. Most are in for crimes relating to poverty (shoplifting etc) or for drug offences, in some cases having been forced into those crimes by male partners. Many have a history of prostitution, many are from care backgrounds, many have histories of domestic abuse (I think that something like half of all women in prison have brain damage from domestic violence.) When you put a woman in prison, you remove her from her children - often she is put many miles away, because there are so few women's prisons. So the family is broken up and the child suffers as well as the mother. It's very hard to argue the case that prison is the right place for these women.

It's true that men in prison often have mental health problems and a background in care and so on. And probably shoving them in with a load of other male criminals isn't going to lead to ideal outcomes. On the other hand, men are a harder problem to solve, in my view, because so many are in for offences of violence or sex offending. What are you going to do with them if you don't put them in prison? Sentences for crimes of violence or sexual assault are already, some would argue, remarkably lenient.

Prison - like a lot of modern life - is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

There is fuck all point in wasting valuable intellect on pissing about with subjects like this until you take a step back and ask yourselves "What are we truing to achieve here.?". Which at the moment is clear as mud. This can be trivially seen if you are unlucky enough to catch "Question Time" and realise the 4 panellists have 4 completely separate ideas about "justice". Which considering one of them is in the government tasked with delivering "justice" isn't a great start to the day.

When you have worked out what you want the criminal justice system to deliver, you can then advance to the next step of "how".

Personally, I think the use of prison should primarily be to remove people from society who have shown they are a real danger to the public. This rarely tends to be women. Unless they are challenging the patriarchy of course. That cannot go unpunished.

Good to see the BBC is doing more than reporting a headline, but looking at what's behind the headline.

See also https://womeninprison.org.uk/news/checklist-for-the-governments-newly-announced-womens-justice-board

Glad to see this, but it has been an issue for many years. Women rarely commit crimes but, when they do, courts judge them more harshly and sentence them more severely than they would men.

If you look at 90% of the prison population you find a history of childhood family dysfunction, poor education/attendance in education, mental health issues etc. im
not saying that the people who commit these crimes aren’t responsible for their actions at all but from a long term, economic view if we put more money into early years we might prevent some of the crime that leads to people being in prison.

Theres no appetite for that tho because that would mean some people getting “something for nothing”. Unfortunately this attitude leads (imo) to feeling disenfranchised and crime. If society doesn’t care for the individual, the individual sees no benefit to caring about society.

Prison doesn't "work" for almost anyone F or M.

Putting a bunch of criminals together under one roof where they become conditioned to violence and each other tends to make them less suited for fitting in to general society.

Glad that this is being addressed with some nuance.