A social work professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of America’s ugliest college campuses, wants to make it illegal to put women in jail and shut down every women’s prison in the country.
The professor, Patricia O’Brien, makes her case at The Washington Post late last week in an essay entitled “We should stop putting women in jail. For anything.”
“The argument is actually quite straightforward,” O’Brien explains. “There are far fewer women in prison than men to start with — women make up just 7 percent of the prison population. This means that these women are disproportionately affected by a system designed for men.”
O’Brien spends the requisite time calling America “a prison nation” and railing against “the prison industrial complex.”
She declares that “there is evidence that prison harms women more than men” while strangely failing to provide any evidence at all for this blanket assertion. Instead, she next proclaims that women are special because “the majority are nonviolent offenders with poor education, little employment experience and multiple histories of abuse from childhood through adulthood.”
O’Brien also asserts that “women are also more likely than men to have children who rely on them for support.” Precisely, she says, “147,000 American children have mothers in prison.”
She doesn’t bother squaring this assertion with her statement a few paragraphs earlier that 93 percent of the prison population is male. She does not say how many American children have fathers in jail.
The professor also suggests that the United States should let all women out of jail and abolish prison for females because a single peer in Britain’s House of Lords also supports it.
“In Britain, advocates propose community sentences for nonviolent offenders and housing violent offenders in small custodial centers near their families,” O’Brien proclaims.
“The case for closing women’s prisons is built on the experiences of formerly incarcerated women and activists who recognize that women who are mothers and community builders can find their way forward when they respected and supported,” she writes. “It is possible to imagine a future without women’s prisons; whether it’s achievable will require a bigger shift in thinking.”
On her Facebook page, O’Brien likes the socialist periodical “In These Times,” OUT CHICAGO and, of course, goofball terrorist Bill Ayers. (RELATED: Terrorist Mars Confab Of Radical Professors At Swanky Resort)
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