Women first, offenders second?

There has been a growing reform movement to reduce the imprisonment of women in England and Wales. Concern over the treatment of women in prison goes back at least to the days of Elizabeth Fry's visits to Newgate in the early 19th century, but recently there has been a sustained and vocal reassessment of the punishment of women; and an increasing concern about the punitive way in which female offenders were being treated (Fawcett Society, 2004). As a result, the Women's Offending Reduction Programme was launched by the government in 2004 to tackle women's offending and to reduce the number of women in prison. Concerned about the rise in female incarceration, the government ordered a review of female offenders in the criminal justice system. Baroness Corston's resulting 2007 report concluded:

The Corston Report, along with many others (such as Fawcett, 2004 and 2009) seemed to confirm what some researchers already claimed: that women were incarcerated for lesser offences than men and earlier in their offending careers and that, since 1990, the situation had been getting steadily worse. Thus, the most recent call for reform goes beyond adjusting how sentences are delivered, both in the community and in prison, to the use of a particular sentence and its abolition – imprisonment.

In 2012, the Prison Reform Trust published a three-year strategy to reduce the imprisonment of women in the UK (Prison Reform Trust, 2012a) and, in June 2014, again called for a reduction in women's imprisonment (Prison Reform Trust, 2014). In Scotland, similar calls were made (Burman, 2012; Scottish Commission, 2012), and Clinks published a similar message calling for a gender-responsive approach to sentencing (Clinks, 2012). The Howard League for Penal Reform has worked since the 1990s to reform penal policy for women, and in June 2014 its Chief Executive, Frances Crook, called for the abolition of imprisonment for female offenders (Crook, 2014).