OMG it's another dispatch #4.22pm

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Angela Harlem

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Profiles of prison populations (as from ABS, 2003):

* 93% are male. Males are 14 times more likely to be incarcerated than females, however, over the past 10 years the female prisoner population has increased at a faster rate.

* Nearly half of all prisoners were convicted of offences involving violence or the threat of violence.

* Most serious offences for males: assault, break and enter, robbery, sex offences

* Most serious offences for women: assault, drug offences, fraud and robbery.

* One in ten prisoners is sentenced for a drug offence.

* Longest expected (average) aggregate sentence was for murder: 19.2 years. The average time expected to be served is a mere 14.4 years.

Stay tuned next week when we paint another beautiful picture: Recidivism Rates - the effectiveness of the current criminal justice system.
 
[sarcasm] Angela, you have restored my faith in the human race [/sarcasm]
 
Angela Harlem said:
Males are 14 times more likely to be incarcerated than females, however, over the past 10 years the female prisoner population has increased at a faster rate.
Is that more due to changes in sentencing (e.g., harsher drug offense penalties) or more due to increases in female criminal behavior generally?
 
It's hard to say, Yolland, though perhaps I just haven't found the answer yet. This info came from a secondary source, but I've gone back to the original and perused that though it doesn't offer (yet) a great answer. Usually the answer lies in a multitude of causes for rises in rates like this. In the early part of this decade there was a distinct (though not too severe) rise in rates of addiction in women with drugs such as amphetamines and lesser drugs such as steroids, hallucinogens and benzodiazepines, etc. With the advent of amphetamines being the new trendy drug, obviously the rates rose as the media focused for a while on the growing risk of these street drugs. Media influences policing to waylay public outcries at not enough being done. Laws are thus influenced to cope. Figures can also be slightly misrepresented, as we see that women's rates are rising and we think that women are on a decade long bender. However, the figures could simply be reflecting that the male rates were essentially unchanged. Any change to the female statistics is then going to look more obvious. An aside to all of this is that for some (as yet) unknown reason (to me) our crimes rates rose rapidly in 2003 and across many areas of criminal activity. I have yet to find a reason why this was so. I cant think of any logical reason why drugs, violence, theft, and others were so accelerated in that year, but there it is. They did drop back again in 2004, but I am wondering if there was some change in rate recordings which effected this; and that's the other thing which causes this - changes in recording crime, arrest, policing, courts and changes in society which influence crackdowns in petty courts, etc.
 
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