What can literature tell us about the female prison population? Professor Nicola Lacey explains how fiction reflects the social constraints on women, making them less likely to go to jail than men.
"If crime is driven by opportunities and the control structures that are present in society, you would think that when women escaped the shackles constraining them in the 19th century, they would be more present in our prisons."
But this isn’t the case, with the percentage of women among those found guilty of criminal acts declining significantly over the 20th century.
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