Unsentenced Women in Custody (From Women in Corrections: Staff and Clients, P 1-7, 2000, Australian Institute of Criminology -- See NCJ-187936)

• NCJ Number: 187941
• Author(s): Sue King
• Date Published: 2000
• Length: 7 pages
• Sale Source: Australian Institute of Criminology
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: Australia
• Note: Paper presented at the Women in Corrections: Staff and Clients Conference held in Adelaide, Australia, October 31-November 1, 2000. Downloaded March 21, 2001

Annotation

This paper explores recent trends in the number of female unsentenced prisoners in Australia and the contribution of these prisoners to the trends in rates of female imprisonment.

Abstract

The fundamental reason for remanding individuals in custody is to ensure that they will attend court as required in order to answer the charges made against them. In addition to this, the need to protect the integrity of the justice system has resulted in the development of the practice of remanding accused persons in custody when it is deemed necessary to protect witnesses, when it is believed necessary to ensure the safety of the accused persons, and when it is believed necessary to ensure that additional offenses are not committed before the completion of a trial. This paper focuses on the social outcomes for women remanded in custody. Remand in custody increases the probability of social disruption for the person remanded. It removes a woman from the social supports she normally uses in a time of crisis. Sometimes this occurs both as a result of institutionalization itself and because the remand location is a significant distance from the woman's support network, making it difficult for people to visit. Of particular importance for women who are single parents is the impact on dependents of being remanded in custody. For the whole of Australia, the female remand-in-custody rate is increasing steadily, but in South Australia the rate of female remand has been falling. The author's research has found that neither court decision-makers alone nor legislation alone offer clear explanations for why remand rates vary among jurisdictions. This led to an exploration of the contribution of the justice process to remand-in-custody outcomes. The study tracked the decisions being made at each point from the time of first contact with the justice system. Three significant phases were found to determine whether offenders are filtered into or out of the remand-in-custody processes: the apprehension phase, police bail phase, and court bail phase. These phases are examined in this paper to show how women's remand in custody is affected at these stages of processing.