Empathy for women, prison for men

Sep 29

Picture this:

Scenario 1: Eric is exasperated with his next door neighbour because her loud music keeps him and his family awake at night. When he goes next door to resolve the problem, she starts screaming in his face. When he shoves her away she trips and hits her head off the wall. She is injured but recovers. The judge sentences him to 2 years in prison and during which time he will see little of his two children.

Scenario 2: Sarah is exasperated with her next door neighbour because his loud music keeps her and her family awake at night. When she goes next door to resolve the problem, he starts screaming in her face. When she shoves him away he trips and hits his head off the wall. He is injured but recovers. The judge orders her to 2 years in a day centre where she can be visited by her children by day and go home to stay with her children at night.

On Sept 24th 2024 Shabana Mahmood MP tweeted “JUST ANNOUNCED: This Government will launch a new body: the Women's Justice Board. Its goal will be to reduce the number of women going to prison, with the ultimate ambition of having fewer women’s prisons.”

At the time of writing Shabana Mahmood hasn’t published a detailed plan, so we can’t say how closely the two above scenarios would match actual sentencing, but her announcement sounds like a revival of the project, published in 2007, to shut down women's prisons and reopen them as men's prisons. This project, spearheaded by Baroness Corston, former Chair of the Labour party, means that all but very worst female offenders (e.g. Rose West) will be able to commit crime without going to prison. Although it this idea has been pushed several times over the years, I don’t think anybody thought any government would be radical enough to actually try to implement it. Yet here we are.

Baroness Corston’s plan is based on the recognition that women who commit crime are in many cases women with mental health problems who have been the victims of various types of abuse in their past. To reduce reoffending, holistic community services are proposed, rather than prison. Although the government has put millions of pounds into women-friendly prison services for women, at the same time it has invested billions of pounds in building more prisons for men.

So why is there a relative abundance of sympathy for female offenders, and much less for male? There are probably two main reasons. Firstly, most crimes are committed by men, especially young men, and the types of crimes committed by men are, compared to crimes by women, generally more noticeable due to being more violent (e.g. murders) and involving physical risk-taking (e.g. armed robberies). Although crime by women – including violent crime – was already increasing around the time the Corston report was published, violence by women tends to cause less injury.

A second factor is the tendency among some criminologists to minimise the significance of female violence by saying our perception of it has increased because violence by women is a topic of increased public interest, and more likely to be reported and investigated than in previous times. Indeed all sorts of mitigating circumstances are brought into discussions of violence by women, such as self-defence, being in a high-risk neighbourhood, feeling overly-controlled in their home, or out of a sense of hopelessness. A man might explain his violence as ‘due to provocation’ or ‘to help a friend’, yet such explanations tend to fall on deaf ears when they come from men.

This tendency in criminology is probably part of the wider tendency for people to see women as victims and men as perpetrators. We tend to notice problems of various kinds when they impact women more than when they impact men, and similarly, we tend to view similar bad behaviours as being less acceptable when done by men than by women, even if the behaviours are similar. These tendencies are suggested to be part of a cognitive distortion called gamma bias the influences our perception of many issues these days.

Related to gamma bias, an interesting thing happens when we focus only on the factors that cause criminality that are outside the criminal’s control: we judge the perpetrator less harshly. That’s probably ok, as long as the criminal is not treated as if their behaviour is something they have zero control over, and is 100% due to circumstances beyond their control. Offenders shouldn’t be denied the opportunity to understand what part their own personal agency has played in influencing their actions.

“Society would benefit from recognising that the factors that influence criminality in women (e.g. being the victim of child abuse, or unemployment) may also influence criminality in men.”

I think it’s important to understand all of the factors that influence criminality, mainly because knowing the causes increases the potential to reduce crime. But we currently have a situation where we spend great effort in discovering and highlighting mitigating issues for female criminals, but little such effort for men. This double-standard is another example of gamma bias, and the gap in empathy we have for men compared to women when it comes to crime. This is ironic given that criminology was criticised by feminists in the 1980s for neglecting to focus on the social causes of criminality in women, when they have gone on to neglect the very same causes in male criminality. In my opinion, society would benefit from recognising that the factors that influence criminality in women (e.g. being the victim of child abuse, or unemployment) may also influence criminality in men.

“Such leniency is a disincentive against criminality, so will encourage women to be criminals, and will encourage men to get women to commit crimes on their behalf e.g. carry drugs, weapons or stolen goods for them.”

Politicians may well feel it will please the electorate to take a sympathetic view of women and take a ‘tough on crime’ attitude to men. There may be more men than women in politics, but the idea that men represent The Patriarchy couldn’t be further from the truth. In contrast, many female politicians overtly favour women and it’s unusual to see any ‘equalities’ campaigns to help men – at least straight white men - in any serious way, despite men being disadvantaged in many real ways e.g. health and education.

Although it is probably true that many people, both within politics and in the general population, are content with the female-favouring status quo, decriminalising female criminality may be a step to far, for several reasons:

Justice. Is justice served by giving female criminals no prison sentence? How does the victim of female crime feel about the relative lack of punishment? Will it help victims get over the trauma of the crime against them, or does the lack of a prison sentence victimise the victim a second time? I’m sympathetic to the idea that therapists must at times tactically suspend judgement somewhat when working with clients, even people who had committed crimes that revolt us. Families of criminals may suspend judgement too. However this suspension of judgement is not so appropriate in the courtroom, where justice and judgement are at the heart of the process.
Men face harsher sentences than women for the same crime. How are men – whether they have committed a crime or not - supposed to feel about this? Isn’t justice supposed to be equal for all?
Such leniency is a disincentive against criminality, so will encourage women to be criminals, and will encourage men to get women to commit crimes on their behalf e.g. carry drugs, weapons or stolen goods for them. In other words, criminal activities in the UK could be carried out with little risk of a prison sentence.
Very obviously, men are discriminated against, which will inevitably foster resentment.
This injustice against half of the population - plus anyone who is a victim of female crime - rips the social contract to shreds. What is the ‘social contract’? In very basic terms, it is the idea that there is an agreement – generally implied rather than verbalised – between the average person and their government. Thus people give up a certain amount of freedom (e.g. the freedom to assault someone if you feel angry) in exchange for living in a society where assault is punished by reasonable laws. The social contract works as long as the average person keeps their end of the deal (being law-abiding) and the government keeps their end (applying the law where needed). However applying the law to only half of the population based on their sex means that at least half of the population have less motivation to uphold the social contract. It also leaves victims of female violence without a sense of justice being done. On top of other controversial restrictions on freedom, Labour’s prison reform idea is not only unjust but risks increasing resentment among the people.
Another issue that has been pointed out by many people in the past few years is that many politicians struggle to agree on what a woman is. We live in times where a rapist who is male can subsequently identify as a woman and then be sent to a women’s prison, where they are a potential risk to others of further sexual assault. If the government are closing women’s prisons, can a man avoid prison simply by identifying as a woman? That would save defendants a lot on legal fees.

“We need a justice system in which every effort is made to understand the causes of the crime, and the most effective methods of rehabilitation should be applied in each case, whether the offender is male or female.”

In the present system, prison can take a massive mental health toll on inmates, whether male or female. If female offenders don’t go to prison that will save them a source of distress, though it won’t of course improve the mental health of male offenders, who make up around 95% of the UK prison population.

I agree we need prison reform, but for everyone. We need a justice system in which every effort is made to understand the causes of the crime, and the most effective methods of rehabilitation should be applied in each case, whether the offender is male or female. At present however the empathy is going only one way – to female offenders. For a government that is already being accused of encouraging two-tier policing, having a two tier prison justice system can only put the social contract under even more pressure than it already is, and that’s bad for everybody.

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Selected references / recommended reading

Collins, W. (2019). The Empathy Gap. England: LPS. ISBN-10: 09571168888

Corston, J. (2007). The Corston Report: the need for a distinct, radically different, visibly-led, strategic, proportionate, holistic, woman-centred, integrated approach. Home Office.

Liddon, L., & Barry, J. (2021). Perspectives in male psychology: An introduction. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 978-1-119-68535

Disclaimer: This article is for information purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, legal advice, or other professional opinion. Never disregard such advice because of this article or anything else you have read from the Centre for Male Psychology. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of, or are endorsed by, The Centre for Male Psychology, and we cannot be held responsible for these views. Read our full disclaimer here.