My favourite line in Julianne Corr’s report for the Sunday Times yesterday on the Government’s alleged new plans to ensure that women go to prison with much less frequency than men, is undoubtedly the last one in the quote below. My emphasis:
Women accused of crimes could be spared imprisonment while awaiting trial, under measures being considered by the Department of Justice.
Officials hope to expand a bail supervision programme that is available to youth offenders to women who come before the courts.
Experts have long called for community-based alternatives to prison for women, citing chronic overcrowding and the damaging impact of incarceration on young children. It’s hoped such measures would also help reduce reoffending.
You might think it’s a bit counter-intuitive to argue that sending fewer people to prison will actually reduce crimes. There is very little supporting evidence for that, anywhere in the world, yet it’s an idea that simply won’t go away. The “theory” here, we can safely assume, is the long-standing progressive notion that sending people to prison is a bad thing because prisons themselves are a gateway to becoming a more hardened criminal: People get exposed to drugs, become addicts, and are otherwise exposed to bad influences that mean they emerge from prison a more hardened offender than when they entered.
Of course, there’s an answer to that: The state should improve prisons, build more of them, and do whatever is necessary to stem the inward flow of illegal substances.
Instead, the state is apparently considering a radical alternative: No jail for women at all unless they are actually convicted of a serious offence. In effect, automatic bail so long as you meet the qualification of not owning a penis, or (and this is important) owning one but declaring it a female organ and yourself the female owner of it.
There are a few obvious issues here, the first of which is the basic principle of equality before the law. The state is, last I checked, formally committed to the principle that sex-based discrimination is wrong and illegal. Yet, if the Sunday Times is to be believed, they now intend to introduce explicitly sex (or more accurately, gender) based discrimination into the penal system.
One might imagine circumstances where an enterprising accused criminal of the male designation instructs his lawyers to take a constitutional challenge on the basis that he would not be being held on remand were he a female accused of the same offence. It is not hard to imagine that he might win.
It is also not hard to imagine that the state – based on its current penal policy and general attitude towards criminal justice – might not mind if he were to win. The state might find it politically unpopular to announce that nobody, except in absolute extremis, is going to jail on remand. The state might find it politically much more palatable to announce a nice pro-woman policy in this regard, and then have the courts tell them that it must apply to everyone. A sort of foreseeable, welcome, and absolutely expected “oops”, if you will.
Anyway, here we get to the next bit, courtesy of our friends at the lavishly taxpayer funded Irish Penal Reform Trust, which has lobbied – with your money – for lower sentences for about three decades now:
Saoirse Brady, executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), said she welcomed the efforts to introduce bail supervision for women in the system.
“With the majority of women imprisoned for low level offences attracting sentences of less than 12 months, we need to ask whether prison is truly being used as a sanction of last resort,” she said.
Brady said circumstances such as poverty, addiction, accommodation issues and poor family relationships could often make it difficult for women to adhere to traditional bail conditions.
Note the bit in bold: It’s a neat trick. The Irish Penal Reform Trust has been lobbying for years for lower and shorter sentences and openly takes credit for having achieved lower and shorter sentences. Now that sentences are short, they turn around and say “well what’s the point in prison at all?”
The long term objective of the IPRT is, of course, the effective abolition of prison for all but the most severe crimes, like murder. They are quite open about this. In the case of women facing charges, they now seem very close to achieving this.
Finally, there’s the objective here: To reduce prison over-crowding.
It should be noted that prison over-crowding is not a function of anything else other than Government policy. There are no external factors here: Two things have happened. The population has grown significantly – by some two million people in twenty years – and the government and its predecessors have refused to expand prison places.
The overcrowding, as such, is by design: When you grow the population and refuse to grow prison places, you will eventually get to a place where you can say that the prisons are too overcrowded and we need alternatives to prison.
You can say – and I would agree with you – that no Irish government is crafty enough to think through a plan like that in the long term. Long term thinking is not what Irish governments do. But it is precisely what organisations like the Irish Penal Reform Trust do: Lobby Governments over decades for shorter sentences and fewer prisons, watch as the population grows, and then be the people to say that eliminating prison in some circumstances is the only option.
The public have, in other words, been played, very successfully.