Although women represent a small minority of the prison population in all nations, it has long been a concern that custody is overused with respect to female offenders. Reducing the number of women in prison has therefore emerged as a policy priority in many Western nations, including the United Kingdom. This article evaluates a range of sentencing strategies to reduce the number of women in prison, on the grounds that their experience of the sanction is disproportionately severe. The challenge is to achieve a reduction in women's imprisonment without compromising the fundamental sentencing principles of equity and proportionality. Although no jurisdiction has launched a sentencing initiative with this specific aim, the international sentencing literature offers insight into the most effective methods by which reductions may be achieved. Informed by the principle of equal impact, which underpins gender-specific sentencing, we explore policy options in two principal domains: (i) statutory provisions to eliminate or restrict judicial discretion to imprison female offenders, and (ii) sentencing guidelines to structure judicial discretion in gender-sensitive ways. We conclude by considering the likelihood of implementing the options.
Respect and Criminal Justice offers the first study of ‘respect’ in criminal justice in England and Wales, where the value is elusive but of persisting significance. The book takes the form of a sustained critique of the ‘respect deficit’ in policing and imprisonment. It is especially concerned with the ways in which both institutions are merely constrained and not characterised by respect. It emerges that they appeal to the word ‘respect’—relying on its inclusive ethos in official discourse when it is expedient to do so—but rarely and only superficially address the prior question of what it is to respect and be respected. Despite academic interest in the democratic design of these institutions in recent decades, respect is more akin to a slogan than a foundational value of criminal justice practice.
The principal aim of the chapter is to examine the merits of respect as a concept of critical enquiry. This is an ambitious task, not least because it involves a challenge to the definitional self-evidence of respect to which criminal justice scholars and practitioners routinely subscribe. The chapter pursues three distinct lines of enquiry and reflection. What is respect? The first task is to attend to this deceptively simple question. In so doing, the chapter assembles materials on respect from philosophy and elsewhere in the social sciences. Second, having explored what respect means in general terms—though this is hotly contested—the chapter sketches and filters the most prominent classic and contemporary works into an understanding of respect for criminal justice. By initiating a dialogue with related disciplines in this way, the aim is to build a strong conceptual platform from which to engage with the substantive material on policing and imprisonment in subsequent chapters. Third, the chapter situates respect in criminal justice in contextual and methodological terms. Much of this work must be justificatory both of respect and of my own methodological choices. Having explained in some detail what respect means and why it has been selected for examination, the chapter considers why policing and imprisonment have been selected as contexts for that examination, and how an interpretive approach offers a means by which to conduct that examination.
This chapter continues to subject a series of unexamined beliefs on respect and criminal justice to critical scrutiny and challenge. There is a shift in focus to prison mealtime, whose pivotal role in shaping the experiences of prisoners has been considerably understated. The chapter is prefaced with a short commentary on prison mealtime in historical context. It is then structured around three key stages of contemporary prison mealtime—preparation, consumption, and resistance—which I propose as organising categories for critiquing the practice. When the authorities treat respect as a weak side-constraint on the pursuit of instrumental outcomes rather than a foundational value of the regime itself, it undermines those responsible for preparing food, degrades prisoners who have no choice but to consume it, and exacerbates the experiences of those who—for reasons of religious belief, physical or mental ill-health, or in protest—resist or refuse it.
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