Punishment has taken many different forms historically. These include bodily mutilation, whipping, branding, loss of civic rights, monetary fines, symbolic deductions (censuring, shaming, and stigmatizing), imprisonment, banishment (transportation), and penal death (execution). Punishment through formal penal systems is now typically associated with imprisonment. Other forms of punishment have been much more important historically.

Imprisonment, banishment, and death have the common, distinctive characteristic of being life-disposing punishments. Imprisonment, banishment, and death remove persons for extended periods from what had been the ordinary circumstances of their lives. Persons in life-disposing punishment and their families and friends suffer from mutual absence. Absence in punishment — the number of persons missing from ordinary life due to state-directed punishment — highlights the relational suffering of punishment.

Absence in punishment can quantitatively encompass imprisonment, banishment, and death. For punishment by imprisonment, absence in punishment is simply the number of persons in prison. For banishment, it’s the number of persons absent under a sentence of banishment. Persons absent in banishment can be estimated by aggregating the number of persons banished (flow) with respect to the average formal length of banishment. Persons absent in penal death can similarly be estimated by aggregating the number of persons executed across the expected remaining lifespan of those persons. Absence in punishment provides a unified measure of punishment across major forms of severe punishment.

Absence in punishment can be deeply understood in common sense. Prison statistics and criminal-justice statistics can be complex and confusing. Absence of persons abstracts from differential incidence of punishment. It allows persons to understand punishment without pondering the details and distribution of punishment across imprisonment, banishment, and death. Many persons have little understanding of the experience of being imprisoned, banished, or executed. But suffering from absence of a person is commonly understood. Absence in punishment provides a meaningful, quantitative focus for comprehending punishment.

The complexities of gender in relation to crime and punishment can be distracting, confusing, and disturbing. Recent scholarship has shown that in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the ratio of men to women implicated in crime was not uncommonly about or below two men per woman.^ The ratio of men to women tended to be higher for violent crimes against the person than for property crimes. For example, in Surry, England, between 1663 and 1802, the ratio of men to women formally charged with assault and wounding was about four men per woman.^ In Cheshire, England, from the 1590s to the 1660s, the sex ratio of defendants in formally adjudicated cases of non-lethal violence against persons was similarly about four men per woman. While non-lethal violence does not cause death, it should be considered serious. In interpreting the Cheshire sex ratio for non-lethal violence, a female scholar attacked still-prevalent stereotyping of women:

Evidence for how women fought does not support a view that women’s behaviour was characterised by weakness and passivity. … Women, like men, spurned, trod, kicked, pulled and pushed, struck on the face and body, pulled head-hair, and threw opponents to the ground and objects at opponents. …In general, women, like men, armed themselves with whatever was to hand: any household or agricultural tool, stones; one woman even threw boiling water in the face of a man who came to collect a debt.^

The evidence from Cheshire shows that nearly three-quarters of the victims of female violence were men. Moreover, cultural norms probably depressed the number of formally adjudicated cases of female violence against men:

male victims tended to downplay women’s physical prowess and to highlight alternative forms of feminine disorder, such as abusive words. … Regardless of actual bodily harm, men situated injuries inflicted by women not on their biological bodies but on their households (family members, livestock, goods, land, dwelling-house), clothing, or other symbols of status and honour.^

Women’s violence against men tended to be presented as comical so as to “deny the seriousness of feminine force” and “inject derision into accounts of female aggression.”^

Anti-men gender bias affects reported violence. For example, a recent book-length study of homicide and gender in Victorian England judged:

almost all {of wives’} violence against husbands was retaliatory in nature, and arguably meriting substantially less punishment than violence against wives.^

Thorough immersion in Victorian ideals, as well as keen sense for his readers’ biases, apparently provided the foundation for these judgments of historically distant cases. Anti-men gender animus is now astonishingly pervasive in scholarly work on domestic violence. From a long-run historical perspective, the ratio of men per women among persons that participated in violent acts against other persons is difficult to ascertain apart from distant records created in the administration of criminal justice. The anti-men gender norms that have guided that administration of criminal justice probably imply that the ratio of men per woman participating in violent acts was less than those records indicate.

The relationship between criminal records and suffering under punishment is not simple. Persons who have committed crimes, persons suspected of crime, persons arrested, persons in different positions in judicial processes, persons sentenced to punishment, and persons actually punished are related groups but also significantly different. For example, among men and women formally sentenced to death for property offenses in London from 1690 to 1750, only 46% of the men and 22% of the women were actually executed.^ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in regions near London, about 30% of men and 10% of women sentenced to death were actually hung. In London itself during that period, about 22% of men and 2% of women sentenced to death were executed.^ Major English courts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seemed to treat female defendants more leniently than male defendants across stages in criminal justice processing.^ In the U.S. today, the ratio to men to women likewise increases across the criminal justice funnel from arrest to being in prison.

Involvement in the criminal justice system is not the same as suffering under punishment. Measures of involvement in the criminal justice system are many and complex. Analyzing gender and punishment can become so distracting and confusing that thinkers lose compassion for the vast majority of persons suffering under punishment. A better way is to seek deep, personal awareness of those who are absent in punishment.

Definitions of offenses entailing punishment, norms of prosecution, and penalties, like the scholarly literature on crime, punishment, and gender, are socially constructed. Recent scholarship on gender and punishment has tended to emphasize highly interpretive contextualization and a conventional master narrative of the social construction of gender.

An alternative path is to seek self-denying common sense of persons suffering under punishment. To do this, one must quiet the self’s interpretative force through focus on a simple object. One must dissolve the self’s habitual narratives with mindfulness of present reality. Meditating upon the ratio of men to women absent in life-disposing punishment can be enlightening. Try this exercise and see!

Sex Ratio of Persons Absent in Life-Disposing Punishment
(Europe, 16th to 19th Centuries)

Sex ratios of persons absent in life-disposing punishment have varied widely across history and across societies. In Europe from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, about four times as many men as women were suffering life-disposing punishment. In England and Wales from 1750 to 2010, the ratio of men to women suffering life-disposing punishment varied from five to forty. Around the world in 2010, about fifteen men were in prison for every woman in prison.

Gender and the operation of justice systems are highly complex. In recent decades, the social construction of scholarly literature on the social construction of gender has produced extensive criticism of the use of the word woman. In a further scholarly development, scholarship has criticized the use of the word women.^ Scholars have explored with uncanny subtlety and complexity how increases in the ratio of men to women in prison indicate increasing oppression of women. Such work can easily be mind-dulling and heart-numbing.

Differences in the sex ratio of persons absent in punishment, in contrast, are significant, readily understandable differences open to compassionate understanding. Human communities typically contain a roughly equal number of women and men. The characteristic human act of biological reproduction involves an equal ratio of men to women (one-to-one). In ordinary life, persons easily recognize differences in the sex ratio of a group’s composition. Moreover, gender equality is an important goal under international law. Historical sex ratios of persons absent in punishment are worthy of deep contemplation.

Under international law, everyone is required to consider and promote gender equality. With United Nations Resolution A/RES/55/2, the world community resolved “to promote gender equality.” United Nations Resolution A/RES/S-23/2, section 6, emphasizes that “men must involve themselves and take joint responsibility with women for the promotion of gender equality.” United Nations Resolution A/RES/S-23/3 requires national governments, under section 76(f) to “ensure that the design of all government information policies and strategies is gender-sensitive.” Under section 76(c), national government must provide necessary resources so that “gender mainstreaming is integrated into all policies, programmes and projects.” European Community law includes similar requirements for gender equality. Sixteen men per woman or even four men per woman absent in punishment are large gender inequalities. Men must join with women to promote gender equality in punishment. For he and she for imprisoned men, scrutinizing gender bias in defining crimes and gender bias in sentencing for criminal offenses would be a good start.

The United Nations’ Human Development Report has recognized the importance of having an equal men-women sex ratio. Its pioneering Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) combined four sub-measures: the share of seats in parliament held by women; the share of women legislators, senior officials, and managers; the share of women professional and technical workers; and the ratio of estimated female to male earned income. These sub-measures were indexed with respect to a goal of an equal sex ratio:

The rationale for this indexation: in an ideal society, with equal empowerment of the sexes, the GEM variables would equal 50% — that is, women’s share would equal men’s share for each variable.^

The first three of GEM’s four sub-measures have direct relevance only to a small number of men and women. The last sub-measure, female to male earned income, ignores difference in experience, working hours, and job characteristics such as the risk of being killed on the job in paid work. It also ignores sex-biased familial divisions of labor between paid and unpaid work, as well as sex-biased family law. Worker characteristics and job preferences can economically explain a large portion of the inequality in the sex ratio of earnings. Given these facts, the Gender Empowerment Measure, and similar subsequent measures, indicate strong international support for having an equal ratio of men to women across a variety of elite positions.

International law requires men and women to take joint responsibility for promoting greater gender equality. Gender equality should be more important than merely a tool for elites competing for elite positions. Prisoners are among persons objectively most impoverished in human development. Concern about gender inequality should give priority concern to gender inequality in prison.