Did you know that nearly a third of women’s convictions are for TV licence fee evasion?

[SimonedeBeauvoirscat]

This is shocking. I’ve known about the terrible consequences of not paying the TV licence fee because it is a criminal offence for a while but I hadn’t realised it was so prevalent in the female prison population. This is also very informative and shocking about the wider population of women in prison.

• almost a third of women’s convictions are for not paying the licence fee

• women are 10 times more likely to be convicted for not paying the licence fee than men

• women in prison are commonly victims of more serious crimes than what they were convicted of

• only 1% of women in prison are there for violent offences

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tv-licence-fee-women-convictions-b1763192.html

November 2020.

And this has been reported over and over again for years.

The TV licence people have the right to bring prosecutions. They take up a lot of court time as well as fucking up the lives of loads of women.

It's appalling.

It keeps being reported and some people who read about it are outraged and most people remain unaware and nothing changes! How can we change this? The effect on so many women’s lives is so terrible. It’s infuriating.

I was under the impression that this has changed over the last year or too. Shocking if it is still going on.

I think I first heard this on this board and yes it's shocking and remains so (along with the number of head injuries sustained by female prisoners).

Do we know how many men are convicted for not paying their tv license and how many of them get a fine as opposed to prison time?

I really don’t understand why funding can’t just be rolled into general taxes. People pay tax to cover all sorts of services like roads, schools, the nhs, and not everyone uses each service at the same level. We agree as a society that those services should exist for the collective good and distribute the cost, figuring on the balance that we all benefit from some things so it works out. Why waste time and money collecting and enforcing tv licenses, let alone the cost of incarceration for non-payment?

women in prison are commonly victims of more serious crimes than what they were convicted of

So much this. I've volunteered and done some work in prisons and the litany of shit women have had to put up with compared to what got them into prison is horrifying. Coercive drug-dealer boyfriend is a constant refrain. With added violence and pimping often.

It is so obvious that emotional exploitation is a spectrum which ends in some really dark places. MN is great at handing out red flags to women who are just getting in at the shallow end - I wonder how many posters know this is where the deep end leads to in far too many cases? What a waste of women’s lives and potential. And the knock on consequences for their children are incalculable.

The problem is the BBC having the power to prosecute (very unusual) and they for some reason are red hot keen on it, and don't seem to care that they are being uneven in who they prosecute (women v men, because men don't open the door to them so much) or that it's totally disproportionate.

Govt ditched plans to decriminalise it Jan this year.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/decriminalising-tv-licence-plans-changed-government-b1792420.html

@NiceGerbil thanks for that info. I had a vague memory they said they would decriminalise. How utterly disgusting they’ve backtracked on that. I despair, I really do.

@NiceGerbil

The problem is the BBC having the power to prosecute (very unusual) and they for some reason are red hot keen on it, and don't seem to care that they are being uneven in who they prosecute (women v men, because men don't open the door to them so much) or that it's totally disproportionate.

Nothing the BBC like better than punishing women these days, it seems.

Thank you for the info NiceGerbil I really thought it had been decriminalised.... why on earth not? How dare they imprison women for this, while leaving abusing men to do it again?

I'm another that thought it was decriminalised.

Does anyone know what, if anything, the main women’s campaigning groups are doing on this? I know we have so much else to work on. But the mainstream organisations like the Fawcett Soc - who are sitting out the trans battle - are they doing anything?!

If we stopped prosecuting women for debt (often accumulated due to financial abuse, or a chaotic lifestyle due to domestic violence), for their mental health conditions and for 'minor' crimes such as stealing food then the female prison population would be more than halved overnight. Add to that sex workers and drug possession (even drug possession with intent most times they are 'holding it' for a man) and the numbers of female prisoners would be staggeringly small. Most women in prison are Victims of gender based violence, be that sexual abuse, domestic violence or abuse, harassment/stalking, etc. And we imprison them for not paying their tv license, stealing a chicken or losing their shit in a public place. And then people like to roll out the statistics as though there are a lot of women with criminal records. Maybe so, but not the same kinds of records.

No one, male nor female should go to prison for debt. Prison should be there to punish and then rehabilitate people for actually committing real crimes.

Indeed. And particularly not a TV licence, of all things!

Another one who thought it had been decriminalised. Or at least that it was definitely going to be, not that it had been shelved.

I’ve known about the terrible consequences of not paying the TV licence fee because it is a criminal offence for a while but I hadn’t realised it was so prevalent in the female prison population.

The article doesn't say that women have been imprisoned for failing to pay their TV license, it says non payment of TV license accounts for 30% of women's criminal convictions. I would imagine the vast majority, if not all, of these end up with a fine. There isn't enough detail in the article to tell one way or another.

I thought that no custodial (prison) time is actually sentenced for TV license evasion? Isn’t it all community service, suspended sentence or fines?

Looked it up, says here that maximum sentence for TV license evasion is a band B fine. None of the women in prison are there over TV license....
www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/magistrates-court/item/tv-licence-payment-evasion-revised-2017/

Thank you for clarifying that PlanDeRaccordement. I wonder if that article was written to deliberately mislead?

Ok clearly I conflated criminal conviction and prison sentence. I apologise for the inaccuracy.

The fundamental point of the thread and the thread title and the inequality of conviction rates still stands - it shouldn’t be a criminal offence, they were going to decriminalise it, and now they’re not. Isn’t that something which matters?

@Castlepeak

I really don’t understand why funding can’t just be rolled into general taxes. People pay tax to cover all sorts of services like roads, schools, the nhs, and not everyone uses each service at the same level. We agree as a society that those services should exist for the collective good and distribute the cost, figuring on the balance that we all benefit from some things so it works out. Why waste time and money collecting and enforcing tv licenses, let alone the cost of incarceration for non-payment?

This has always puzzled me too. It seems like the obvious solution. No other publicly funded service works like this.

The conflation was caused by me in my attempt to summarise the article by the way - not by the article’s author who I think was clear.