WOMEN’S enhanced roles in drug networks and a trend towards targeting women for lesser disorderly behaviours are partly to blame for the rising number of women in Australian prisons, a leading criminologist says.

The number of women in jail is on the rise, up 11 per cent in the year to June 2015, compared to a national imprisonment growth rate of six per cent.

And women are increasingly being jailed for violence-related offences, which now represent about a third of women’s imprisonment.

QUT School of Justice head Professor Kerry Carrington said one explanation was a policing trend towards “upcriming”, a term used mostly in the United States to describe the criminalisation of lower-level offences that would have been ignored a decade ago.

“For young women is particular, behaviour they used to do is now getting much more attention from the authorities, things like being loud, boisterous, fighting,” she told news.com.au.

“What’s really changed is that women have become much more active in drug networks and drug supply cultures. They’ve become couriers and messengers, they lease their apartments out. And some drugs of course enhance violent behaviour, such as ice.”

Prof Carrington said about 18 per cent of women were in jail for drug offences — the second highest classification of offences among women inmates, following violence-related offences at 33 per cent.

“Drugs were always something that was really a man’s world, but not anymore,” Prof Carrington said.

“This is as well as the music scene, and the pub scene — they were always men’s worlds. But women, and younger women especially, are more active participants in the kinds of networks that tend to get in trouble.

“And the argument is, and it’s only one explanation, is that because when women are being deviant, they’re seen as being doubly deviant. It’s the opposite of chivalry — the threshold for intervention for women is lower (than for men).

“There’s been a 60 per cent increase in women’s imprisonment in the past decade and we have chronic, chronic overcrowding as a result of that.”

Prof Carrington said she believed “society’s anxiety” over young women’s bad behaviour had shifted from concerns about sexual promiscuity to the image of the ladette or “bad girl”.

And because women had always been pinned as the fairer sex, there was something extra monstrous about when they engaged in bad behaviour, even low-level crimes, she said.

INCARCERATED WOMEN IN AUSTRALIA

The statistics surrounding women’s imprisonment in Australia paint a grim picture: most women inmates come from extreme poverty and disadvantage, and many have children, which makes the prison experience even more punishing.

More than half of inmates have issues of domestic, child and sexual abuse, as well as substance abuse.

And around one third of Australian women in jail are indigenous, even though indigenous people represent 3 per cent of the national population.

Also, half of women in prison are on remand, and of those who have been sentenced, it is usually for much shorter periods than men.

Prof Carrington, who is speaking about women and incarceration at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House this week, said most women behind bars shouldn’t be there at all.

“These are simply women who have mental health issues, they have drug and alcohol issues, they’re homeless, and most of these women have had history with trauma and domestic and sexual abuse, and that’s backed up by solid research,” she said.

“That’s what makes women prisoners different from men.

“Two-thirds of them should not be locked up in the first place. Some of them are locked up for the most ridiculous things, like dirty urine when they’re on probation and they have a drink and they’re put back in the slammer.

“The vast majority don’t pose any risk to the community. Prison doesn’t help them get their lives together.

“We need to stop being so overly punitive on the smallest breaches. That half of these woman are on remand, and not even sentenced; that has to change.”

Prof Carrington said the focus should be on community-based rehabilitation programs, which were also significantly cheaper — she said it cost, on average, $100,000 a year to imprison a woman, compared to $20,000 for an effective community-based rehabilitation.

“It would be a hell of a lot cheaper, it would be a lot better for them, it would be a lot better for the taxpayers of Australia and a lot better for everyone all around,” she said.

“We have massive overcrowding and we don’t have the programs to deal with women and help them get back on the straight and narrow.

“The overcrowding is bad in women’s prisons — they’re doubling up in cells, they’re sleeping on floors, the sewerage systems are at risk of overflowing or not working. It’s a serious problem.

“The other thing is that crime rates are in fact doing down, but imprisonment is going up. And that’s a whole other dysfunction.”