1 : Women , punishment and social justice

In the last 20 years, there has been a growing international recognition that prison is an inappropriate response to women in conflict with the law and a subsequent concern among academics, policy-makers and practitioners to reduce the number of women imprisoned (Sudbury 2005; Sheehan, McIvor and Trotter 2011). Across jurisdictions, lawbreaking by women differs in a number of important ways from lawbreaking by men: it is less common, less frequent and less serious. Women are typically convicted of relatively minor crimes that pose little public risk and, because they are usually convicted of offences that are less serious than those committed by men, the sentences they receive are also different: for example, women are less likely than men to receive sentences of imprisonment. However, female imprisonment has increased dramatically in most western jurisdictions over the last 15-20 years as evidenced by increases in the numbers of women given sentences of imprisonment, in daily female prison populations and in the rate of imprisonment of women (McIvor 2010). Moreover, because the rise in women’s imprisonment has outstripped parallel increases in the imprisonment of men, women now make up a greater proportion of prisoners. There is little evidence that more women are being imprisoned because of an increase in the seriousness of female offending: rather it appears that a complex range of factors are responsible including legislative changes and increasingly punitive responses to women in conflict with the law (McIvor and Burman 2011).