Don't release violent male offenders, repurpose women's prisons for them instead

Patronising much?

"the early release scheme should apply to both sexes". Well that's what I've been saying and bizarrely Cohensdiamondteeth suddenly agrees with it.

No you haven't answered my question. Forget sex for a minute, prisoner A failed to pay court fines, in prison for six months. Due to overcrowding released after two months. Prisoner B failed to pay court fines and in prison for six months. Overcrowding but not released early as they are a B. That doesn't seem fair does it

Now think A is male and B is female and now is it fair that A gets released early because he's male. That doesnt seem fair.

Now reverse the sexes and A gets released early because she's female but B isn't. You say that's fair. Why?

.

Surely there is common ground here.

Men commit crime.
Women commit crime.
Most people would expect prison to be reserved for the most serious crimes, which would include sexual offences and violent offences. This is because of the danger these offenders present to the rest of us, and also to reflect the damage they have done. There's also the deterrent effect.
Statistics show that almost all sexual crime is committed by men. The number of men imprisoned for sexual offences in the UK is higher than the number of women imprisoned for every offence.
Statistics also show that most violent crime is committed by men. Also, because men are usually taller and stronger than women the damage they inflict is likely to be worse.

So, given all of that, there are far fewer prison places for women.

The early release scheme should apply to both sexes, but because women's offending patterns are different and the total number of women in prison is so low, the number of prison places this will free up is not going to be very high. Drop in the ocean, so not going to solve the problem of overcrowding in male prisons.

Can we all agree on the above?

but for the record, I don't think anyone should be in prison for not paying their council tax.

no-one's said that women aren't violent and men are. However as a class men are much, much more violent than women.

And Fred/Rose West - no, actually, I really can't be arsed. Something about pigeons shitting everywhere.

I can't be bothered with this. the grown ups were having a useful conversation, I thought

I agree. It cant be beyond the wit of intelligent civil servants to come up with more creative punishments!

Well having to explain the same thing over and over and being told I've said things I haven't justified a bit of patronising.

So you think releasing a woman who has been locked up for not paying council tax means she's safe but a man who has done the same is dangerous. That's prisoners who have done the same thing. So tell me if a woman is released for that sort of crime why wouldn't you release a man who'd done he same? With the advantage he'd actually free up a space for a man?

You can't justify it so you'll start about women not being violent (some are) and men being violent (some aren't.).

On a thread where we are challenged about Rose West being dangerous I suppose we can't expect more.

The patronising tone does you no favours.

Two things:

(i) imprisonment isn't, first and foremost, about fairness. It's about keeping the rest of us safe, mainly from violent crime. Men, as a class, are more dangerous than women. Therefore, we should lock men up before we do women.

(ii) two apparently-identical crimes are rarely the same. Where a woman commits a crime, there is usually a man behind the scenes, controlling, encouraging, and/or abusing them. In those situations, the best thing is not to lock the woman up, but to remove the man from the situation (imprisonment or whatever else) and provide the woman with support to get on with her life.

Why do people keep making things up. I haven't said there's no difference in typical behaviour. What I have said is if (get that if it is significant) they've done the same crime they should be treated the same. Seems a very simple concept but beyond some people.

TheignT seems to be very strongly invested in there being no differences at all between the typical behaviour of males and females.
To the point of trying quite hard to misread and misinterpret every comment. Why so touchy about this?

He isn't going to be released early is he?

There is some evidence she was the one in control. He wasn't very bright. She killed his daughter while he was in prison. Defend her all you like she was at least as dangerous as him.

I think we really need to be clear and use actual data, not just received wisdom here. This is a very serious matter, both for public safety and for women in the criminal justice system.

1 - The idea that roughly 2,500 women in prison are there for non-violent offences is not supported by the current Ministry of Justice figures. On 31 March 2026 there were 3,461 women in prison, including 848 on remand. Of the 2,593 women serving immediate custodial sentences, 1,063 were sentenced for violence against the person, 144 for sexual offences and 217 for robbery: 1,424 women, or 54.9%, across those three categories alone. The official tables do not provide a simple violent/non-violent total, so subtracting the “violence against the person” category from the whole female population is not valid.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-october-to-december-2025
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69f0c7400bb62e692c5d6dae/prison-population-31-Mar-2026.ods

2 - Women are not routinely in prison merely because they could not pay council tax or a TV-licence fine. The Government says nobody has been imprisoned for council-tax non-payment as their main offence since 2018; committal is possible only after a finding of wilful refusal or culpable neglect, not simple inability to pay. On 31 March 2026 there were just two female fine defaulters in prison for all kinds of fines combined. For TV licensing, there were zero people in prison for failure to pay the fine on 30 June 2020; 91 custodial sentences in 2015–18 arose from failure to pay a court-imposed fine, not from licence evasion itself.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65ba708df51b1000136a7e4a/CouncilTax_collection-_government_response.pdf
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-publishes-response-to-decriminalising-tv-licence-evasion

3 - It is also incorrect that most women in prison are serving sentences of under 12 months for fraud and petty theft. There were 349 sentenced women serving less than 12 months: 10.1% of all women in custody and 13.4% of sentenced women. In the immediate-custody offence table there were 404 women sentenced for theft and 63 for fraud, compared with 1,063 for violence against the person. Source: the same MoJ prison-population publication and spreadsheet above.

4 - It is plainly wrong that only the “tiny handful” of women who commit murder belong in prison, or that women in custody are almost all harmless petty offenders. The current figures include 1,063 women sentenced for violence against the person, 144 for sexual offences and 217 for robbery, as well as serious non-violent offences whose victims may still suffer grave harm.

5 - Murderers are not being released early under these schemes. Murder carries a mandatory life sentence; release can occur only after the minimum term and a Parole Board risk decision, while some offenders receive whole-life orders. The Sentencing Act 2026 also excludes life sentences, IPP sentences and extended determinate sentences from earlier release. The “killer” example reported in the Telegraph involved manslaughter, not murder.

https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/about-sentencing/types-of-sentence/life-sentences/
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/2/notes/division/7/index.htm

6 - Early release has not been restricted to men. In October–December 2025, SDS40 produced 10,164 releases from male establishments and 1,013 from female establishments. The 2026 progression model is based on sentence type, offence and behaviour, not sex.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69f1d916c42061e837e3ac16/Standard_Determinate_Sentences__SDS40release_data__England_and_Wales.pdf
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sentencing-bill-2025/sentencing-bill-progression-measures-factsheet

7 - “Women reoffend less” needs an important qualification. Across all offenders in the January–March 2024 cohort, the female proven-reoffending rate was lower: 24.7%, versus 29.7% for men. But among people released from prison in the April 2023–March 2024 data tool, 1,752 of 3,491 women reoffended (50.2%). Combining comparable male category A–D/local prison groups gives 18,253 of 44,297 (41.2%). Women in that prison-release cohort also recorded more reoffences per reoffender, 8.54 versus 6.74. These are unadjusted figures and do not prove that sex causes the difference, but they directly contradict the blanket claim about female prisoners.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/proven-reoffending-statistics-january-to-march-2024/proven-reoffending-statistics-january-to-march-2024
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6978dace316fd8f801552068/PRSQ_adult_releasing_prison_data_tool_apr23_mar24.xlsx

8 - Women do not simply receive “the same time” as men in practice. In the official 2023 comparison, women convicted of indictable offences were 28% less likely than men to receive immediate custody. For theft the figures were 20% for women and 37% for men; for violence against the person, 15% and 41%. Average custodial sentence length was 12.2 months for women and 21.8 for men, although the MoJ cautions that the different offence mix explains part of that gap.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/women-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2023/statistics-on-women-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2023-html

9 - It is too sweeping to say women’s prisons are not secure or reinforced. The women’s estate includes both open and closed prisons. Bronzefield is a purpose-built closed prison holding restricted-status/high-risk women. It is fair to say there is no women’s prison built to the same high-security specification as the male high-security estate, so conversion could require additional work; that is not evidence that conversion would necessarily be “prohibitively expensive”.

https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2023/05/Restricted-status-thematic-web-2023.pdf
https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2019/04/Bronzefield-Web-2018-1.pdf

10. Repurposing one women’s prison would not create 3,500 places. Approximately 3,500 is the entire female prison population. Bronzefield, for example, held 483 women on 31 March 2026. Nor does the Telegraph proposal itself establish the cost or feasibility: the article reports a campaign proposal to repurpose at least one prison, not an implemented, costed government plan. The latest overall annual cost per prisoner was £56,618, but that does not tell us what converting a particular establishment would cost. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/25/repurpose-womens-prisons-men-government-urged-tories-uk/ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69bbeea2f7b1c24d8e23ce44/costs-per-place-costs-per-prisoner-2024-2025-summary.pdf

She was certainly as dangerous, she helped him and then covered up for him.

Are you seriously suggesting that Rose West was more dangerous than her husband?

That's an incredible claim to make.

You said a woman is far less dangerous. Not always as RW demonstrates.

I've said it more than once. I think if violent men are released early (not a good idea) then women should be as well (also not a good idea)

A better idea is releasing prisoners who committed non violent/not serious offences. Sex of prisoner it being relevant. I honestly don't understand why that is so hard to understand.

Obviously as a group.
Stats are a technique for looking at grouped data.

I am not completely against this but if some of the prisons for women become prisons for men then the women who are still in in prison will be in a much smaller estate and are likely to be placed even further away from their social support network.

This is already an issue for a lot of female prisoners and their children and other social networks.

I'm an equal opportunist, a woman should get the same time for doing the same crime as a man.

Yes, exactly this too. Where a woman has co-offended with a man, or where she has been induced or encouraged by a man, the better thing is not to lock the woman up. That achieves nothing. The best thing to protect society is to remove the man from the picture, and provide the woman with support.

Obviously there are exceptions (Rose West, anyone else?) but I suspect this will cover most women offenders. I couldn't immediately find any stats on the point, possibly because the research hasn't been done.