Domestic Circumstances, Domestic Violence, Child Care...

†¢ ‘Domestic circumstances, domestic violence, child care issues and single parents †¢ Personal circumstances, mental health issues, low self-esteem, eating disorders and substance misuse †¢ Socio economic, poverty, isolation and unemployment’ (Corston Report, 2007, pg2) Baroness Corston insists that just one or a combination of these categories, will ultimately lead to ‘crisis point’ and the individual in question will no doubt end up within the Criminal Jus-tice System. This was mirrored throughout her report and was met by other contributing fac-tors. Baroness Corston also believed that women and men are different and, if equal out-comes are required, acknowledged that different treatments should be targetted. The brunt of the report†¦show more content†¦Following the Corston report, there were 43 recommendations made, relating to issues of im-provement to prison conditions, sanitation etc and efforts to help women, who are at high risk of reoffending. These covered general support needed for women offenders; improvement to their health services; community sentences to be used as the norm instead of automatic imprisonment; the specific development of a wider support networks. These recommenda-tions will be further discussed within the discussion section of this dissertation. This will be done in the context of a follow-up report that was issued five years after Baroness Corston’s original report was published. Fawcett Society In 2004 the Fawcett Society was established to help seek broad equality for women within society. During 2004 they also formed a commission to help develop an understanding of the status of women within the Criminal Justice System. This dissertation will analyse the infor-mation provided from the second annual report, which gave aspects of the Judicial System that clearly identified women offenders as being far more vulnerable than men. From 1995-2005 there has been more severe sentencing by courts which has had a detri-mentally disproportionate effect on numbers of women being