Guest post by Lisa Kerr

We are now familiar with the major criticisms of federal Conservative crime policies, especially their introduction of mandatory minimum sentences. Adrienne Smith, a health and drug policy lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, aptly summarized the problem with mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes as follows: “they are expensive and they don’t work.” Yet apart from the cost and the absence of deterrent effects, there is an additional problem that is worth drawing attention to. The removal of discretion from sentencing judges causes significant growth in female rates of incarceration.

Indeed, in the notorious American imprisonment binge of the last four decades, women have been the fastest growing inmate population. The number of imprisoned women rose from 15,118 to 112,797 between 1980 and 2010. If we include local jails in that figure, more than 205,000 American women are now incarcerated. The female rate of incarceration increased at nearly 1.5 times the rate of men (646% versus 419%).… Continue reading