"But women serve longer prison sentences after killing abusers!", one of our fellow purple pill debaters threw at me. I was not particularly surprised because I keep seeing this feminist lie again and again.

In 2020, feminist activist Mona Eltahawy repeated it in an essay, musing on systematically killing men to end patriarchy. Women's March cited the same nonsense in 2018. DomesticShelters.org loves repeating the lie, this time in 2024. Feminist subs, which I will not link to, are full of it.

In a disregard for facts and logic, so typical for this kind of people, they refer to it as "ACLU statistics". It is neither. Yes, the only known source of this claim is a 2006 ACLU article Women in Prison: An Overview:

Women receive harsher sentences for killing their male partners than men receive for killing their female partners.

The average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners is 2 to 6 years.

Women who kill their partners are sentenced on average to 15 years, despite the fact that most women who kill their partners do so to protect themselves from violence initiated by their partners.

But the actual source of this claim is stated simply as "National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. 1989.". There is no statistic, no actual source, just some 35-year-old unverifiable claim.

At one point, a 2019 The Guardian article went as far as asking if this claim is true, acknowledging that it is indeed a bit ancient. But then it came to the false conclusion - let's add, unsurprisingly, this is The Guardian - that there is no data to decide one way or another.

In fact, we have plenty of actual data. Real statistics. Not just the sentencing but the whole criminal process discriminates against men. Let me simply quote Wikipedia sources:

United States

A 2001 University of Georgia study found substantial disparity in the criminal sentencing that men and women received "after controlling for extensive criminological, demographic, and socioeconomic variables". The study found that in US federal courts, "blacks and males are... less likely to get no prison term when that option is available; less likely to receive downward departures [from the guidelines]; and more likely to receive upward adjustments and, conditioned on having a downward departure, receive smaller reductions than whites and females".\9])

In 2005 Max Schanzenbach found that "increasing the proportion of female judges in a district decreases the sex disparity" in sentencing which he interprets as "evidence of a paternalistic bias among male judges that favors female offenders".\10])

In 2006 Ann Martin Stacey and Cassia Spohn found that women receive more lenient sentences than men after controlling for presumptive sentence, family responsibilities, offender characteristics, and other legally relevant variables, based on examination of three US district courts.\11])

In 2012 Sonja B. Starr from University of Michigan Law School found that, controlling for the crime, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted", also based on data from US federal court cases.\12])\13])

United Kingdom

A paper examining gender sentencing disparities in a large samples of assault, burglary and drugs offences found that male offenders are subjected to significantly harsher sentences, even when controlling for mitigating factors and case characteristics. Men were 2.84 times more likely than women to receive custodial sentence for the offence of assault, 1.89 more likely for the offence of burglary, and 2.72 more likely for offence related to drugs. For offences of assault, the gender factor was stronger than any other ‘harm and culpability’ factor with the exception of the ‘with intent to commit serious harm’ factor.\14])

France

A 2020 study shows that women receive 33% (15 days) shorter prison sentences than men, even when controlling for all observable characteristics – including a very precise description of the crime. When pairs of mixed-gender offender are convicted together the gender gap is even higher - men receive 38.7 additional prison days and 10.7 fewer suspended prison days.

From a procedural point of view, when controlling for the type of crime, men are on average judged after shorter investigations, and are more likely to be sentenced after an accelerated procedure. When taken to court, men are 20% less likely to be discharged (6% vs. 4%). In 2017, 19.9% of convicted men were sentenced to prison, compared to 8.5% of convicted women.

With decreasing number of female judges in the court the gender gaps in prison and probation sentences widens - prison and probation sentences are lighter for women, while suspended prison sentences are longer. The gender of the prosecutor seem to play no role.\15])United States

Bonus: The UK government's solution to this discrimination against men is straight from the feminist playbook:

Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has set out plans to slash the number of women going to jail and ultimately close women’s prisons amid an overcrowding crisis.

She unveiled a new body, the women’s justice board, which will have the “ultimate ambition of having fewer women’s prisons” – potentially allowing them to be converted to male or mixed jails.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/shabana-mahmood-labour-prison-women-close-b2618123.html