Tracie Andrews released from jail after serving 14 years for killing Lee Harvey

[rainbowtoenails]

I cant do a link to the news reports on this from my phone but I'm sure someone else can do that.

I saw Lee's parents on This Morning today. It is very sad that they have suffered the awful loss of their son and I can see why they feel let down by a justice system where life does not mean life.

But, looking at this case with a feminist gaze I cant help but make comparisons with other intimate partner killings. Mostly committed by men, these other cases Ive heard of rarely end up with a sentence of as long as 14 years. It reminds me of what I read ages ago in Helena Kennedy's 'Eve was Framed' that the justice system is harder on women than men for the same crimes. Im not saying that TA should have been let out sooner but that people of both genders who commit these crimes should be given equally long sentences.

Greater social input in children and families would break the cycles of abuse which result in huge prison populations.

Exactly.

When someone with no family unit to miss gets jail time it's not as effective as sending someone with a loving family inside.

Drug programs that work would help too.

And we should stop sending people to prison for non violent offences.

The poorhouse is still with us i'm afraid (Under a different name).

We've got to stop looking at short term fixes and invest in long term policies starting with educating young people properly about the effects of drugs instead of just spewing lip service to an idea that isn't supported by government.

I wonder what the figures are for poor people in prison to the well off in prison?

Society has to change.

Poverty is vile and destructive. I think feminism, with its emphasis on equality, is equally about ending poverty of vulnerable people as it is about ending male violence against women.

Society has been engineered to separate and stigmatise different factions so they can't join and fight together as a union against government.

When all the divided factions join and have a central goal it will change, until then the lawmakers will just continue playing one side off of the other.

Our objective should be universal global equality and no less.

The statistics on drug use prior to custody goes a long way to explaining the statistics on custodial sentences.

If someone is using drugs they are often not suitable for community punishments- they simply can not or will not comply and therefore for an offence where the custody threshold has been reached there is (at present) no viable alternative (especially where the defendent doesn't want to seek treatment for drug abuse - and sadly many don't).

It is therefore not as simple as saying woman receive harsher sentences in like for like circumstances. However there are clearly issues surrounding why more females abusing drugs.

From the link I posted earlier, it was clear that a large percentage of women in prison suffered from a) poor educational level b)mental health issues c) sexual abuse d) domestic violence.

There was a report on the same website that was pushing for alternatives to prison for a lot of these women, and an urge to look at ways to support the families affected.

i think one of the biggest problems[reg drug abuse]is the stigma.
especially when it comes to women and even more so women with children.
i think its partly this stigma that keeps the women in the circle of abuse.
eg-a woman using drugs associates with others using drugs.if she becomes "clean" she has to move herself away from her associates.
when shes done this-she is then left being a "ex drug user"[in societys eyes]
there is a stigma attached to this-so what does she do?yep-go back.
so not only has she got to deal with the stuff that lead her to using in the first place-shes further isolated by becoming "clean"[stigma]
i dont think society can sort out the beggining untill you sort out the end!
take away the stigma and the shit that goes with it-then you can do something.
its all wrongness upon wrongness![for these women]

I'm starting to think that people don't actually read posts LRD. No one here knows what's in the book other than SGM who was unable to add any other sources. On that basis it could have been given 5 stars by God himself and it wouldn't add any veracity to SGM's claims until such time as any of us were able to see that it genuinely did contain evidence that women recieved more harsher sentences. No, what I found wasn't great, but it was the only reference that dealt with the matter one way or another - contrary to the claims being made. Every other person on this thread who has also tried to find evidence has been unsuccessful. I find it REMARKABLE how people pick up on everything but the fact that THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that women recieve harsher sentences and almost wilfully twist what I've said to try and wriggle away from this fundamental hole in the debate. ffs read the posts!!!

I do think women have a different experience of the criminal justice system then men, however, I think Tracie Andrews has gotten off very lightly indeed. No sympathy here.

I agree with jenny in so far as I really would like to see the home office statistics which were referred to and I don't really see how it is acceptable to be so rude to someone who is challenging an apparent refusal to supply info which I have to say is not easily googleable.

Unless there is some back story between posters here which I am unaware of I don't think jenny is being rude in challenging undisclosed sources. On should we all just blindly acccept what we are told

<a class="break-all" href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/www.justice.gov.uk/publications/sentencingannual.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Here are the sentencing statistics 1999 - 2009.

The Sentencing Statistics supplementary tables spreadsheet for 2009 gives all the facts and figures you could possibly want. Tab 2j on that gives average sentence length by gender and type of offence.

From a cursory look at that, it does not appear to me that women are on average given longer sentences than men for each type of offence.

There is also info on the number of life sentences, IPPs, community service orders for you to disect at your leisure.

jenny, I do see you can't read it right now, but I thought it was rude you just rejected it. It is peer-reviewed: that does mean something. She's given the information - the onus is really on you to go and look at it if you want to argue!

SGM - yes, I read that about dyslexia. It's not (imo) the cause of illiteracy - loads of people are illiterate and not dyslexic, I know people who work with them and they do seem quite easy to distinguish (in adults). Women have poorer access to education across the world, though, so the UK is a bit of an anomaly if a higher proportion of men in prison are illiterate.

anon - yes, I agree.

had a quick look at those stats - thanks portofino.

i think the biggest problem with the stats is the clear imbalance between the number of women convicted versus the number of men. it's most markedly seen in sexual offences 1999 where the male average is 37.8 whereas the female average is 14.5 but the total average is then 37.7... it's pretty obvious that the averaging for men is over a large group whereas the averaging for women is over a much smaller number - around 1% of the number of men if i'm reading the stats correctly.

i really don't have time to study the stats properly but am i right in being depressed rather than impressed by the average sentence for sex offences? the long averages would suggest to me that only violent serial rapists and paedophiles are actually being convicted while people charged with single counts of rape are not being convicted.

I note you don't mention Portofino's reference SGM. Quick - let's talk about something else! DV and rape are always good standby discussions when it looks like the dogmatic response has been challenged...

Thank you Queen of Denial...

LRD I think you'll find we were both rude - but at least mine was out of exasperation of SGM's refusal to acknowledge that she made a false statement. (Harsher, easily googleable. etc) At no point did I say that peer review was not relevant to a book's credibility - I am saying that to refer to the book as substantiation when we have no idea what Kennedy's findings are is weak in the extreme. Is that book really the easiest reference? If that's the easiest reference then I have more questions...

skrumle - those averages are months. So your average male sex offender gets 3 years. That seems very low to me. I am intrigued by sex offences committed by women -what are these likely to be? Child sex offences, women sleeping with minors.....?

d'oh!!

although i'll now need to go back and look again as i don't remember the other numbers looking so odd!

i would imagine women will be paedophiles, women in positions of authority sleeping with of-age students, sexual assaults on men/women and the type like the case that is in the news at the moment of the teenage girl who procured other teenage girls for men to rape...

i havent looked at none of these stastistics so please forgive me if i state something thats already been said.
im not sure about sentencing[reg women]
but i think that a woman will actually serve a longer sentence than a fella [for same crime]as a fella is likely to be let out of prison earlier because of overcrowding in prisons.so they might be given same sentence but actually serve more[if this makes sense]-a fella might come out on tag.

Yes that makes sense. I didn't see any figures about parole etc.