Sample Solution

shame to her family. However, during her appeal against conviction, Shah admitted poisoning her partner because of his abusive behaviour towards her. The then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, reduced her twenty year sentence to twelve years, but Shah was only released in 2006 after she had served two years longer than her reduced prison sentence. This illustrates that the reasons for a woman’s violence sometimes is not taken into account in comparison to male offenders, and implies a gender-biased view towards what is considered as acceptable provocation within the Criminal Justice System.

The case of the Scott sisters in the USA also exemplifies how women have been given a harsher sentence for lesser crimes of violence in the past. The sisters both received a double life sentence for an armed robbery, in which nobody was injured or killed, and less than 12 dollars was stolen (Papa, 2011). Further evidence to support this gender biased view was published by UK Crime Info. Between 1995 and 2005, the imprisonment rate for women in England and Wales increased by 175% in comparison to an increase of 85% for men. This data alone suggests a greater willingness to sentence female offenders to imprisonment for less serious offences. This therefore contradicts the chivalrous belief, whereby women are said to be treated more leniently in the Criminal Justice System due to the fact they are not considered as being capable of being criminally motivated, and thus are reluctant to sentence them as harshly as men. Elizabeth Stanko (1994) argued that male violence is ‘downplayed’ and ‘normalised’ as it is difficult for people to accept women’s violence, despite any mitigating factors that may exist.