Gender & Crime

'Why are men more likely to be convicted when they commit the same crimes as women
and why are they given harsher sentences than women after convictions for the same crime?'

Focusing specifically on why there are more males in jail than females. I decided to explore this topic because I came across an article in the Guardian and the article was titled, "Are Men Natural Born Criminals? Prison Numbers Don't Lie." The author of the article a Jessica Abrahams stated our jails are overflowing with men while women account for less than 5%.

There are 84,731 people in prison in Britain and according to the latest figures 80,915 of them are men, less than 5% of this country's prison population is female and tat trend is similar elsewhere in the western world. In France it's about 3% in Germany just under 6%. The global median is about 4.3% according to the figures from the international centre for prison studies and she then went on to say that you can find all sorts of trends by analysing the demographics of the prison population that might tell us something about the groups most likely to offend at least at a level warranting incarceration, but perhaps the most striking and persistent is that serious crime is still overwhelmingly committed by men. Unfortunately Jessica misses the real issue by a mile. Jessica attempts to pin the blame for this gender difference in incarceration rates on male biology in one paragraph she stated that quote "some people have of course argued that it is biological rather than sociological, that men are naturally more violent for example or that they are stronger and therefore more capable of committing crimes. She also blames something which she terms hyper-masculinity and later decries the lack of "male safe spaces where males can talk, share their feelings and emotions with others". Since the author is a female I don't begrudge her offering up such a solution as a safe space for man as this may actually work for women, the fundamental flaw in her argument as far as I can see is that she fails to tackle the real questions, which are, at least in my opinion, Why are men more likely to be convicted when they commit the same crimes as women and why are they given harsher sentences than women after convictions for the same crime?

What I'm keen to do with this video is twofold, firstly to explore the actual reasons for not only the vast explosion in the rates of incarceration, but why the majority of those serving time are male and secondly to explore the question of whether men are actually more likely to commit crimes than women and perhaps offer a more sensible explanation for this difference that we see...                           



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