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This year you made a press release on women in prison,
can you summarize for us the message of this?
Yeah, what we wanted to study was how many women are in prison
for drug offences across the European and Central Asian region.
And what we found was that about one in four of all women in prison are there for drug offences.
What we defined in our cases are possession, sale, trafficking and so on.
We didn’t include acquisitive crime, in order to buy drugs
and so on because that would multiply the number.
What we found was that there was over 30 000 women in prison across the region for drug offenses.
It’s twenty-eight percent of the entire number.
Some of the findings stand out, however, and the big one was Russia.
Russia incarcerates more women for drug offences than the entire European Union
combined; more than twice as many as the European Union combined.
And it has about half the population of women. In fact Russia incarcerates more women for drug
offences than all other fifty countries that we looked at, combined, about 20 000 women.
There are many countries where more than forty percent
of all women in prison are there for drug offences.
Sweden – over forty percent. Portugal – forty-six percent.
Although that figure is coming down, and it would be interesting to see
how maybe successes in decriminalizing personal possession might be able to move
towards trying to divert women involved in sales and trafficking
particularly carriers away from incarceration as well.
Spain, which has a known problem with drug mules from Latin America
incarcerates twice as many women for drugs as neighboring France,
but has about ten million less women in its population than France.
And some other standard figures like that. Italy and Greece had significant problems as well.
So across the region we thought that there was considerable cause for alarm,
which is why we named the title that, and we will be doing more research
in future do understand those numbers and to dig deeper at a national level.
Do you have any recommendations to government delegates here at the CND?
We made four broad recommendations without getting into too much detail.
I think it’s things that colleagues of ours would have said many times over.
We talked about decriminalizing personal possession across the board,
we talked about mitigating factors for more serious crimes
to divert women away from incarceration, we talked about a presumption against
incarcerating mothers, and acting always in the best interest of the child.
We felt that it was important to mention recommendations at the end.
We’ll get into more detail in future research.
Olvassa el a tanulmányt a fenti címen!