Prison Sentencing Argument

The year is 2016; the American woman has the right to vote, the right to an education, and now has the right to fight on the front lines alongside fellow Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, or Airmen. Currently one of the major party candidates for president in the 2016 election is a woman. After all of the years women have spent fighting for equal pay, equal rights, and equal responsibility, should they be granted leniency when it comes to prison sentencing? The answer to that question can be summed up in one word, no. I will begin defending my position on this topic by starting with the Women’s rights movement, the initial meeting held in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. These brave women drafted a document, taking a page from Declaration of Independence itself …show more content…
Most of these juveniles - about half the juveniles in long-term confinement- said they had lived primarily with their mothers. And more than half of them reported that a family member also had been imprisoned at least once. About 26% said their fathers had been incarcerated. ” (BJS Data Report, 1988). This data shows that keeping these mothers out of prison does not have a positive influence on their children, living with their mother does not decrease the chance of them staying out of the corrections system. In fact the majority of this report shows the having a father figure that is not incarcerated, plays an important role to keep juveniles out of prison.
I believe that having different sentencing for women and men is not only unfair to women, but to their children as well. It not only sends the message that it is ok to break the law as long as it is only a minor offense, or ok to break the law because you are a woman, but it keeps a bad influence in these children’s lives. Childhood is essentially when we are taught right from wrong, and a judge being lenient on a woman because she has children is not the correct message to