three - The context: women as lawbreakers

Summary

Baroness Corston's report, A review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system, made a series of recommendations to bring about improvements in relation to the treatment of women in the criminal justice system. Now, some six years after her report, we found that it is well recognised that women face very different hurdles from men in their journey towards a law abiding life, and that responding appropriately and effectively to the problems that bring women into the criminal justice system requires a distinct approach. (House of Commons Justice Select Committee, 2013: 3)

Introduction

In this chapter, we review not only the profile of female lawbreakers in terms of the range of offences committed, but also what we know about such women: about their backgrounds, needs and problems, with a particular focus on any changes in relation to this since the Corston Report was published in 2007. We also examine what we know of women offenders in relation to who persists and who desists, and point to some policy and practice developments post-Corston.

Responses to women lawbreakers have been a focus of interest and controversy for some considerable time, as Lucia Zedner (1991) vividly describes in an analysis of Victorian responses to them. At that time, a prison matron wrote of her charges:

As a class, they are desperately wicked … deceitful, crafty, malicious, lewd and devoid of common feeling … in the penal classes of the male prisons there is not one man to match the worst inmate of our female prisons. There are some women less easy to tame than the creatures of the jungle, and one is almost sceptical of believing that there was ever an innocent childhood or better life belonging to them. (A prison matron, 1862: 46)

There was particular interest in the issues affecting women lawbeakers following the publication of Women in prison, in which Ann Smith (1962) painted a clear picture of the sorry lives of the women within, and an article by Frances Heidensohn (1968), which challenged the invisibility of women in the study of crime and deviance. The 1970s saw the publication of Carol Smart's (1976) book Women, crime and criminology, in which she not only questioned why so many women were being imprisoned for relatively small crimes, but also heavily critiqued the possibility that there might be a functional equivalent between prisons for men and psychiatric hospitals for women.