Doing time for men’s crimes: How to reduce the number of women in prison

“If we started implementing small changes and put money into them, we would change the world - we’d reduce incarceration massively.”

In 2020 a new program launched in Alice Springs with an aim to keep First Nations women out of prison.

The Alice Springs Alternative to Custody Program provides accommodation and rehabilitation programs for women in contact with the criminal justice system, with room for up to 10 First Nations women and their children.

Initially an 18 month trial, the program has been hailed as a success already.

An external review of the scheme found that as of mid-2022, 80% of the women who had completed the program did not return to prison, compared with 40% of women released from prison in the Northern Territory.

The review found the program had made a “positive contribution to the physical health and wellbeing of participants and should continue to be supported”.

The expansion of this alternative to prison program is a recommendation from the new report by The Justice Map, ‘Doing time for men’s crimes: How male violence is driving record numbers of women into Australian prisons’.

Rocket Bretherton, a campaign and advocacy coordinator at the Justice Reform Initiative with lived experience of incarceration, said the Alice Springs program should be used as a model around the country.

“If women are supported to stay out in the community in safe, secure accommodation instead of being forced to go back to partners who bash the crap out of them just because they’ve got nowhere else to go…if we supported people to get safe, secure housing then our imprisonment rates would drop drastically,” Bretherton told The Justice Map.

“If there was more money in alternatives like rehabilitation, programs that support women with housing and safety, all the socio-economic factors that everyone takes for granted, if we started implementing small changes and put money into them, we would change the world - we’d reduce incarceration massively.”

The women’s incarceration crisis

The Justice Map report, which I helped work on, was led by Melanie Wilde and Naomi Murphy.

It is based on 6000 hours of researching, interviewing and yarning with people in prison and recently out of prison, and reveals how male violence is driving women into prison, and how women are being criminalised and incarcerated for being the victims of domestic violence, poverty, trauma, homelessness and mental ill-health and addiction.

“Jail was like my father: cruel, violent and controlling,” a participant at a Yarning circle in the ACT said.

“But it kept me alive. I hated it, but at least I could survive there. Outside, I often felt like I wouldn’t survive.”

Studies have found that up to 85% of women in prison have experienced family and domestic violence, and the large majority have a history of victimisation and trauma.

Experiencing this trauma led them into poverty, homelessness, mental illness and addiction, and instead of being provided support and a health-based response to this, they are instead criminalised and incarcerated.

The report also shines a light on how women are punished for men’s crimes due to the response by governments to violent acts by men, such as the bail crackdown in Victoria following the Bourke Street attack.

Those interviewed for the report also said that they saw the prison system itself as a perpetrator of violence in its own right, with the incarceration in a system built for men worsening trauma and creating trauma.

What needs to change

The report makes a number of recommendations to address these issues and reduce the number of women in Australian prisons.

These include the establishment of a federal inquiry into women in prison, based on a wide-ranging inquiry in the United Kingdom in 2022.

The UK Women in Prison inquiry had an aim to “address female offending and reduce the number of women in custody”, and led to the Female Offender Strategy 2022-2025. It put forward ideas such as the scrapping of short sentences, treating more people in the community and taking into account the impact of sentencing on people with caring responsibilities.

It also focused on earlier intervention and improved community sentences. There has been a 21% decrease in women in prison in the UK in the 10 years to 2022. The UK has also launched Problem Solving Courts, with one focused solely on women, to ensure that sentences better address the actual drivers behind the offending.

The report also recommends the creation of a national dataset on women’s incarceration, increased funding for community-led prevention and intervention, the expansion of women-centred services, improved access to housing, a commitment to universal basic services, the piloting of women’s residential centres and the introduction of gender-specific sentencing.

You can read the full report here.