A Disgrace to their Sex?” Women in Prison

“A Disgrace to their Sex?”

Women in prison

It can be argued that women have always been treated differently from men by the criminal justice system. One outcome of this difference can be seen in imprisonment rates.

Out of the over 160,000 people transported to Australia, for example, women represented only 20%.

Criminal conviction rates resulting in imprisonment have also been lower for women over the last 230 years. This pattern is similar for Britain and America.

From a different perspective, it could be argued that women’s treatment by the authorities was actually harsher, and more intrusive, than that experienced by men. Why might that happen? One reason is that women become pregnant and have children. These biological facts were (and are) enmeshed in an array of social and cultural prohibitions which made women more at risk of being imprisoned for “social” crimes – such as public drunkenness and prostitution – where men’s imprisonment more frequently involved crimes of violence.

Women’s lower imprisonment rates may be the reason why it took so long to provide separate prisons for women. While institutions such as the dozen or so female factories established in the colonial era were purpose built and gender specific, the reasons for women’s incarceration there ranged from poverty and homelessness, to unmarried pregnancy, through to conviction for serious crimes. Thus unlike the regular gaols (which predominantly housed men) it was women’s gender that was the decisive factor in their incarceration.