Gendering Of Criminal Justice System

Gendering Of Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system is highly associated with equality among all the people who are its subjects. Regardless of who the person is, their race, economic class, or even sex, the expected results are that if the crime is identical, the punishment given should also be the same. The expectations, though, differ in some cases and are met in others. It all depends on the rules that are set by the law-making bodies of the country, agreements by the judges, or antecedents achieved from a previous court decision. One of the main areas where equality in punishment has raised questions is that of gender. Gender is different from sex; in that sex is only about physical appearance while gender extends to the expectations of society and social constructions. Gender is heavily oriented on the lives of the men and the women in the contemporary world rather than their just being male or female. Hence gender requires consideration when it comes to the criminal justice system, considering that it is a focus more than just how the individuals are biological. The court systems and the correction facilities should make evaluations to make sure that there is fairness achieved in the decisions that are reached. That is because equally treating men and women only mean that the women are put in more challenging positions as per the judgments made and punishment given. It makes it to a magnitude appropriate for the criminal justice system to be gendered in the application of punishment; the question is to what extent.

In different aspects of the contemporary world, women are treated differently from their male counterparts. The society has given the women and their counterparts’ different construction in aspects such as treatment, opportunities, duties and more elements that are prevalent in their daily undertakings (Bajetta et al., 2005, pp. 2160). The same case should apply to punishment in the criminal justice system. It is imminent that there should be equality among all the people who are before a panel of criminal justice expertise, but that does not erase the fact that equality is not established through identical treatment. The women are taken as more delicate beings in society for the longest time because of the patriarchal nature of the society where the masculine needs are served more adequately than the case is with feminine basics. Thus with the criminal justice system, the women should be treated differently from the men as far as the accorded treatment does not in any way put the women in a more favorable or adverse position that when there is not such a standard. The Justice system in many situations avoids the cases where they would have to treat the two sex differently because they believe they would put the women in a position where they will be more willing to commit criminal offenses. That is considering the fact that when their punishments are less severe, there will be no reason as to why the women would not commit crimes. They fail to consider the position that when the women’s and men’s punishments are the same, they will women are put in even more severe positions, and they end up suffering higher than the male culprits.

As per the basics stated, there are magnitudes to which the justice system should be gendered to allow for a more harmonious society when it comes to punishment of the genders. One such extent is when it comes to bail required before an individual is let out of jail. The main reason why there are bails is to enhance the protection of the public. That though is not achieved when the men and the female are accorded equal bail amounts when they commit crimes such as drug possession or any other crime that they are due to be in jail for. That is minding that men and women do not have the same financial capability. The women have not been equally positioned like the men in the society financially to allow them to pay the bails like the men. That is why there still are many women in jail just because they would not afford to pay a certain amount of money, something that another male perpetrator was able to pay with a lot of ease (Agozino, 2018, pp. 102). The statistics that are provided showing that the rate of female incarceration is growing higher than that of the men, therefore, could not be right considering the financial capabilities of the two when they are required to pay bail. Therefore there should be a measure put in place to ensure that all the genders given bail should be able to pay the specified amount. With the equality probe, it only allows for the case where the able (in this case, the men who are better placed than the women) to pay the required. In that case, the bail does not serve the purpose that is due to protecting the general public. It ends up protecting the men and pushing the women in an even harder position when they are found to have committed a crime (Jabour, 2013, pp. 150).

The extents, therefore, to which bails are placed on men and women should be evaluated first. Equality on such a factor like a bail should not be based on the element of having an equal amount on paper requiring to be paid. It goes as far as considering to whom the subject person. Like there are different economic classes of people depending on what they do for a living, so is the case when it comes to gender. Economic and financial capabilities are also separated on the lines of gender. It is not in every society that the women have developed past the bracket of household chores; some are still held at homes to do household duties with no wages entitled (Fonseca et al., 2012, pp. 94). Asking for huge bails from such a woman would be doing them much injustice. To make matters even worse, the spouses of such women are either not able or not willing to pay the bails for them. Some of them are living in poverty levels, and they cannot afford to pay for the bails and also give their family the lifestyle that they are due. Therefore they opt for keeping their families and satisfying them instead of paying their bails. In other families, the males are not in good terms with their women, and therefore they will not even care about the conditions that they are in while in jail. To avoid such cases where the women will lie in oppression, it is only wise and fair if there is a consideration of the bails being given for the women based on their financial capability.

The mother-child contact should be another magnitude to base the gendering concept in the criminal justice system. A case in point, in the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2000), reported that in the year 1997, 59% of the women who were in federal prisons and 65 percent of the women who were in state prison had minor children. By the end of the decade, the number of young children whose mothers were in jail had almost doubled compared to the data at the beginning of the decade. In the year 1999, the number of young children who had their mothers in prison was almost hitting 126,000 children. According to data collected in 1995 at California prisons, 80 percent of those who were involved were mothers. Many of them, for that case, were single mothers who had an average of two children, and by the time that they were taken into prison, they were the custodians of the families. For them, the separation from the children has ended up becoming a very damaging aspect more than the troubles they face inside the prisons that they are in. More than just being separated from the children, there is no way that the two parties are able to have contact. The children are left to have a life unknown to parents, while the latter are held in prison without the possibility of seeing or knowing what their children are undergoing. There are many cases where separation of parents from their children will lead to a termination of the relationship between the two. A child remains an orphan, and the mother lives a life of hardships, not knowing the how-about of their children years down the line.

To the degree of avoiding the situation where there is a break of motherhood from young children, it becomes crucial that gendering be applied in the criminal justice system. Every judge and a correctional officer would agree to the fact that one of the most critical relationships in shaping the life of a child is the mother-child relationship (Reidler and Swenson, 2012, pp. 1152). How a mother relates to their child when they are growing not only sustains the child in the short term but also in the long run. The way a child grows hugely depends on the life that a child learnt from their parents at a very young age. For instance, the children who were left by single mothers when they were still young, it is very likely that they will get into their young age with a disorderly lifestyle. There is a huge possibility that they will end up in the streets or in groups who can only lead them into a life of crime as they try to make a living for themselves. The code of the streets dictates that they must make use out of every opportunity that they have, and for many times they will only end up being involved in illegal practice like pickpocketing or even robbery. In such a case, criminal justice will not have made any step towards solving crime in society. They will only have sent one person into prison for committing a crime and made another one in the outside world since they do not have an option. Therefore there should be regulations that cater for which extents of crimes the mothers should be prisoned for, and that is depending on the children they have in custody.

The struggle for means to survive in the society is another extent as to which the criminal justice should consider while punishing subjects in regards to gender differences (Carlton and Segrave, 2013, pp.42). In numerous cases that the women have been held in prison due to crimes, there is a considerable percentage that they were engaged in crimes because they wanted to survive in a society that has not yet embraced women in different places of work. The world is still positioned in a masculine era where there is nothing much the women can do in situations where they are considered as weaker beings. For example, in the employment avenues, even though they are now embracing women, not all fields have accepted the fact that they can be able to take some of the roles. Mostly for hugely paying jobs, the people who are employed are the males since it is believed they gave a better capacity to function there. The women are left top struggle with jobs that are paying peanuts. It all happens in the name of the men being better thinkers, workers, and inventors. The women have not yet been appreciated for the capabilities that they are due. The men are also seen as the family providers; hence they are given priorities in job cases so that they can afford to provide for their families. Unfortunately, there are no contemplations on the women who are single mothers and others who are the breadwinners in their family, a position that many women are holding today. When men lose track, the women decide to find means to put food on the table and survive.

It is the reason why a lot of women are caught up in activities such as drug trade as they try to find a way that they can use to feed their families. A considerable percentage of the women who are held in prison are there because they were either caught in drug trafficking and consumption, or they were engaging in prostitution or other hustle related activities (Shelley, 2012, pp. 245). Their husbands while still in possession of the children left some of these women and they did not have jobs at that time. Moreover, considering that jobs are scarce, the only way out they had ended up being against the law. In such cases, instead of harshly punishing the victims of family violence and tough ways of survival, the criminal justice system, which is a government section, should encourage the creation of employment and finding justice for victims of marital violence. In that way, there is no way that these women will be on the streets trying to feed their children and searching for better opportunities for them through illegal means. Furthermore, to avoid the more women getting on the streets for the same reasons, or even minor ones, there should be minor punishment given to them. With that, lesser women will get back on the streets.