women receive much lighter sentences than men

[wanderlust]

Recently I wondered if this might be true and decided to do a little reading. There's lots of coverage in the media related to rape and male on female domestic violence, but it's rarely mentioned that the penal system is much lighter on women.

To summarize, women receive sentences that are on average 63% lighter than men. This disparity is 6x larger than the racial sentencing disparities, which definitely receive media coverage. Only older female repeat offenders, especially if they are black, received comparable or heavier sentences than men, given a similar crime and criminal history.

Anyway, here are some links to back it up.

https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/f ... ities.aspx

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/1 ... 74742.html

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/ ... story.html

[jamesbond]

Recently I wondered if this might be true and decided to do a little reading. There's lots of coverage in the media related to rape and male on female domestic violence, but it's rarely mentioned that the penal system is much lighter on women.

To summarize, women receive sentences that are on average 63% lighter than men. This disparity is 6x larger than the racial sentencing disparities, which definitely receive media coverage.

Women in western countries literally get away with murder. I have heard reports of women killing their children and not getting ANY jail time!

Also, we have all heard of female teachers who have sex with their underage male students and a lot of the time the woman will get little or no jail time!

It's unbelievable what women get away with in western societies.

[w.p.o.]

And they complain about "women oppression." Give me a break.

[books]

Women receive sentences that are on average 63% lighter than men when compared
for identical crimes, made in identical situations.

This is like each time you go with an emergency to the hospital, a man automatically would have to wait 63% more time than a woman, in order to get help for the same problem (for example a heart attack)

[Yohan]

This is a link to an academic study about this topic.

https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp2870.html
http://ftp.iza.org/dp2870.pdf

Do You Receive a Lighter Prison Sentence Because You Are a Woman?

An Economic Analysis of Federal Criminal Sentencing Guidelines

The Federal criminal sentencing guidelines struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 required that males and females who commit the same crime and have the same prior criminal record be sentenced equally. Using data obtained from the United States Sentencing Commission’s records, we examine whether there exists any gender-based bias in criminal sentencing decisions. We treat months in prison as a censored variable in order to account for the frequent outcome of no prison time. Additionally, we control for the self-selection of the defendant into guilty pleas through use of an endogenous switching regression model. A new decomposition methodology is employed. Our results indicate that women receive more lenient sentences even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history.

.....

We find that women receive prison sentences that average a little over 2 years less than those awarded to men. Even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history, women receive more lenient sentences. Approximately 9.5 months of the female advantage cannot be explained by gender differences in individual circumstances. In other words if women faced the same sentencing structure as men, women would on average receive 15.4 months less prison time than men rather than 24.9 months less prison time. Most of the gender gap arises from convictions via guilty pleas, which account for the vast majority of the convictions observed in our data. Besides gender, we find evidence that judges took into account factors such as family circumstances which are expressly prohibited from consideration when awarding sentences.

The full text of this study is free for download as PDF. Link above.