Women,crime and criminal justice Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Women,crime and criminal justice - Assignment Example Moreover, prisons are the culmination of several oppressions, including, class, ethnicity, indigenous status, and race. There is considerable discrimination against women in prisons, and this chiefly stems from their lesser proportion in the prison population. The security levels in prisons are grossly disproportionate to the lower seriousness of offending, which characterizes women offenders. Another disquieting feature of prisons, vis-Ã  -vis females is their tendency to isolate women to a much greater extent than men. This arises due to the smaller number of incarcerated females, which leads to the presence of fewer prisons in a specific geographical area. As such, women prisoners are subjected to greater social stigma than their male counterparts (Barberet, 2014, p. 163). In addition, prisons pathologize and infantilize females, thereby subjecting them to greater oppression. Hence, women should not be imprisoned for the less serious crimes. In addition, the close similarity in the conditions of women in prison, across the world, has made it possible to formulate international norms and guidelines for prisoners. Several of the international guidelines have suffered setbacks, due to cultural relativity or the imposition of Western standards. Prison standards have not been affected to the same extent by these influences (Barberet, 2014, p. 163). A major cause for this relative insularity is the fact that prisons are predominantly a Western institution that have been imposed via colonialism. As a consequence, the issues created for women in prisons tend to be quite similar across the world. This is despite the disparities in the manner of operation of prisons, the categories of females who are incarcerated, the crimes that these females have been charged with or sentenced for, the resources provided to female prisoners in the prisons, and the problems envisaged by these females