I just found out about the gender sentencing gap. Holy shit, how is that not the only thing you guys talk about?

ThePigmanAgain · 2015-09-04T02:27:48+00:00

"Who the hell is (besides a batshit crazy feminist) is going to tell you with a straight face that men deserve a death penalty when a woman that commits the same crime gets a slap on the wrist?"

MSM scum like Geraldo Rivera made it clear that Karla Faye Tucker should not have been executed because she was a woman. So did many christian conservatives. As for the issue itself, it is often discussed here -- that's what we mean by someone getting the pussy pass.

BigHarryDeal · 2015-09-04T02:37:05+00:00

My question is simply why do you guys not make this your primary talking point?

Because:

post-conception reproductive rights
alimony
child support
false rape accusations and civil suits

Very few men are ever going to be arrested, much less put on trial, convicted of a crime and sent to prison. Essentially, while the sentencing gap is an important issue, it just isn't going to affect that many men.

But women being given legal entitlement to money earned from a man's labor? That is going to affect a majority of men at some point in their life.

DavidByron2 · 2015-09-04T03:22:45+00:00

People generally have no sympathy with men as it is, trying to make them have sympathy for men who are also convicted of something is even harder.

Of course something like half the people in jails aren't even charged with stuff and 1 in 4 men will stay a night behind bars in the USA, most while innocent.

Most people end up having kids and for most people who have kids their children are incredibly important to them. many people would die for their kids. Having your kids stolen from you by the state is a pretty big deal, as are the vast amounts of money involved in the family court rackets. Plus also a ton of women are negatively impacted by the anti-male bias there.... mothers who never see their grandkids, second wives...

the-tominator · 2015-09-04T03:00:44+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Mitschu · 2015-09-04T11:03:43+00:00

Ma'am, you're looking down at an iceberg from the bow asking how come nobody is talking about it, while ignoring that the ship is simultaneously cracked in half, burning down, being bombarded with cannon fire, getting rammed, being boarded by (apparently suicidal) pirates, and headed towards an iceberg.

The gender sentencing gap is practically superficial alongside the gender mutilation gap (in countries that practice FGM, they almost exclusively also practice MGM, but the reverse does not hold true, several countries that practice MGM do not practice FGM and in fact have made it illegal... yet FGM is all we hear about, hypocritically with the loudest voices particularly found in those countries where MGM is legal but FGM is not.)

It's practically superficial compared to the education gap, which has been steadily growing and has long been female dominated, yet's steady gynocentric growth was recently celebrated by the US president as an "achievement for equality". From pre-school to K-12 to college, men fare worse, and this is supposedly a good thing.

It's practically superficial compared to the advocacy gap, where we have hundreds of thousands of gendered programs exclusively benefiting women and... zero programs exclusively benefiting men. The closest "male exclusive benefit" is the Selective Service registration requirement that opens up government aid to us, and can only be counted as an exclusive benefit if you ignore that women get the exact same benefits without having to register.

The workplace safety / treatment gap. We have countless resources available to end harassment against women no matter how minor, and practically none to end death and permanent disfigurement against men. For fuck's sake, we didn't even have workplace safety standards enforced at a federal level until women finally joined the workforce.

The violence gap. We spend billions each year fighting rape and domestic violence, both incredibly small samples of an overarching level of criminal violence that is otherwise largely ignored. Even as evidence comes to light that rape and domestic violence, "anti-women violence", is also largely (if not dominantly) suffered by men as well, few (almost no) resources are diverted to help male victims.

The health awareness and medical gap. I'd bet you don't even know what color ribbon Prostate Cancer gets. This isn't a jab, most people don't. It gets practically non-existent levels of awareness raising and funding, so most people hem and haw and then finally guess right (blue, for boys.) Now, I'll give you three guesses for Breast Cancer's ribbon, and the first two don't count.

Even biting my tongue at snarking further, take a look at cancer research by funding, and then by severity / death count. You'll quickly see "female cancers" at the top of the first list (Breast Cancer research alone gets 19% of the funding (110m out of 581m dedicated to hundreds of different types), and "male / general cancers" at the top of the second (by coincidence, Breast Cancer comes in at #19 in terms of 5-year mortality rate, while ironically googling cancer survival rate brings up instead Breast Cancer specific survival information despite BC coming in #3 in terms of which cancers you are most likely to survive and #7 in terms of best prognosis survival trends, alongside women in general having a cancer survival rate 8% higher (54% compared to 46%) than men, and lower lifetime risk of cancer total.)

The next time your company forces you to renew your mandatory Obamacare package, take a look at how many pages are dedicated to exclusively mandated women's health coverage (in mine, three pages), how many to exclusively men's health coverage (in mine, one very short paragraph), and funding to issues that ostentatiously affect both sexes equally (about half a page.) Then remember who pays more for health insurance now that the companies aren't allowed to "discriminate" on their rates by gender.

(While I am grateful that my insurance includes one free visit to the OB/GYN a year and the right to neonatal care at a low deductible, I feel strangely enough that I might never invoke those benefits, and am thus being forced to pay for services I will never use.)

In short...

Yeah. The sentencing gap sucks. But it's a drop in the bucket. There are a number of shitty deals that men get, and some of us feel differently about the prioritization.

For example, if I told you that 58% of women in the US will have been sexually assaulted before they even turned one year old, you'd probably agree that that was a sign we needed to nuke the US and then piss on the ashes. When the odds of sexual victimization are greater than a coin flip before they've even said your first word, something has gone terribly wrong.

... Now if I tell you that no-bullshit, 58% of men in the US (according to 2010 information) have been sexually mutilated before they turn one year old...

And that's just one of them.

I genuinely cannot think of any issues that affects men more severely than this.

Look around. Observe. You'll easily think of a few dozen more that are close contenders, once you start researching it and realizing how prevalent and terrible all of our issues are. There's not a single one in particular that we can point to and say definitively "this is both more important and more prevalent than all other issues men face, we should devote all our attention to it."

JayBopara · 2015-09-04T07:10:56+00:00

This issue is discussed many times over here. It is known as the "pussy pass". Also, many laws are designed to screw up men even though they are written as 'gender neutral'. More and more laws are getting passed which disproportionately hurt men and for little gain other than filling the coffers of the police, lawyers, prison guard unions, government, and to make the moral chauvinists feel better about themselves. And of course all those who want to "protect women & children" feel better.

And here is a link to a study which indicates men get sentenced worse than women by a factor of six, 6, 6 times in the UK. http://mra-uk.co.uk/?p=215

Juan_Golt · 2015-09-04T07:51:29+00:00

My question is simply why do you guys not make this your primary talking point?

It is one of our talking points, but it would be pointless to make it a primary issue. It would mean one unpopular group (MRM) leaping to the defense of an extremely unpopular group (Criminals). We wouldn't get any traction.

It seems much more severe and much more immediately apparent (of how fucked up it is) than things like MGM or custody of children.

Severity is difficult to judge. I expect it will be easier to convince people to not cut their kids genitals before trying to convince them to go easier on criminal sentencing. Child custody issues is also an easier sell and are a contributing factor in a child's future criminal activity. Better to not be sentenced at all, rather than sentenced equally.

Seriously, this is the strongest piece of ammunition you've got in your arsenal.

I disagree. Personally I think fathers rights/shared parenting is an airtight issue and it is close to victory. You even see feminist websites scrubbing/deleting their opposition to shared parenting. I expect parenting equality will be realized in the next decade.

Who the hell is (besides a batshit crazy feminist) is going to tell you with a straight face that men deserve a death penalty when a woman that commits the same crime gets a slap on the wrist?

You would be surprised how prevalent this type of thinking is. No one ever says 'we should sentence/prosecute men and women differently' but it's easy to see how it happens.

Imagine that average Joe is walking down the street and sees a woman chasing a man and yelling profanity at him. Joe will probably assume the man stole something from her etc... Reverse the genders with a man chasing a woman, and average Joe will think the woman is in serious physical danger. In both cases the assumption is that the man is the criminal.

2015-09-04T05:06:51+00:00

It is a big point that we do discuss here often. It isn't the only thing we talk about here is because, in my opinion, it isn't an issue that effects us as bad as other issues. Not many here have a story about how they got a harsher sentence for a crime, but many have stories about child custody or of being a victim of DV but treated like the aggressor.

Marriage and having children are simply more common than being arrested for a crime. Many men here have gone through MGM as well. With any group, I think people here talk about what they have more experience with. That's not to say they don't speak up about other things. The gender sentencing gap has been posted a lot here lately though (specifically adult female on underage male sexual assault), and a lot of discussion about that.

You don't have to be a man to be an MRA. I would suggest reading around this sub a bit and see if our views are something you agree with. If you disagree with something, speak up, people here are up to a debate about an issue, and with the exception of a few trolls, it is civil debate.

Vandechoz · 2015-09-04T19:21:14+00:00

I think it might be one of those things where the lack of clear opposition on the subject makes it uninteresting to talk about. Even feminists agree that the sentencing gap is wrong, they just blame Patriarchy and move on. So the argument then becomes about feminism using Patriarchy as their fall-guy for everything, which is whole other can of worms.

DavidByron2 · 2015-09-04T19:55:35+00:00

You know ministers in the UK have suggested women should never be locked up for any crime; that women's prisons need to be simply closed.

thrway_1000 · 2015-09-04T03:59:36+00:00

This paper assesses gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted. [Link]

When all variables, sex, sentence length, and offense category, were considered, a significant difference was recognized in sentence length, and mean sentence length for men was longer, indicating a harsher penalty for the same or similar offense. Standardized scores for length of sentence with regard to sex offenses in general showed a mean of 8.42 for men as opposed to 7.92 for women. In addition, those specific offenses, which found a significant difference in sentence length, rape, child sexual assault, and forcible sodomy, showed a mean standardized sentence length of 9.38, 7.88, and 9.04 for men, as opposed to 8.83, 7.41, and most notably, 6.23, respectively (Table 2). In no instance were women sentenced to longer or more severe sentences with regard to any sex offense. [Link]

Landjo · 2015-09-04T09:10:28+00:00

This is actually a good question. A few reasons come to mind: - Railing against the gap can easily be misunderstood as promoting penalism - our goal should be more leniency overall rather than stiffer penalties for women (except in egregious cases). - It may very well be that men and women committing the same crime may differ in terms of the severity of threat to society. No doubt not by far as much as the gap indicates, but also not a negligible factor. - As with homelessness and work accidents, other instances of a gender gap as blatant as sentencing disparity, they affect only a small portion of men - which, coupled with the gender's culturally and biologically proclivity to downplaying risk, makes the subject appear less urgent than warranted. - Potentially much worse then the sentencing gap is the gap in the preceding stages of the judicial process - sometimes we do not even consider it a crime when a woman does it. Just watched the first episode of Northern Exposure: a woman shoots and stabs her husband for attention, and the doctor just encourages them to talk to each other. With that kind of bias at all stages of the judicial process, it is striking that there is any sentencing of women at all.

What do you think?

shinarit · 2015-09-04T09:29:55+00:00

how is that not the only thing you guys talk about?

Probably because most of us are not sentenced.

SigmundFloyd76 · 2015-09-04T11:53:11+00:00

Just World Fallacy.

For example, after my car accident and subsequent Compression fracture diagnosis, I was prescribed Oxy Contin. It's good for "sprains and strains" they said.

Of course, people suffering depression and Oxy Contin are a bad combo because, not only is it good for treating pain, it's the best mood stabilizer ever invented.

Yada yada, years of struggling with addiction, completely MY fault and surely I deserved whatever suffering I brought into my life. Never mind the class action suit against the makers of Oxy, never mind that they knowingly misled doctors claiming it was the least addictive opiate (turned out to be the worst), never mind that the family that owns it made 15 billion as legal, government endorsed dealers.

Society says I'm a drug addict. Society says It was my fault, society says Man Up.

I'm not shirking responsibility for my life, but I know I didn't deserve to treated like a criminal.

GenderNeutralLanguag · 2015-09-04T12:07:31+00:00

The gender sentencing gap is probably the biggest issue. But that's the problem with addressing it. The issue is HUGE and multifaceted with connections to all sorts of generalizations and stereotypes. Addressing this issue will require massive amounts of resources that the MHRM simply doesn't have.

By trying to address smaller issue, issues that won't have the massive push back, the MHRM is building momentum and establishing the infrastructure needed to tackle larger issues.

Addressing the sentencing gap won't help women. We run into all sorts of problems with being labeled misogynistic for a lack of benevolent sexism when trying to address the issue. Issues like equal shared parenting will have secondary affects beneficial to women. This makes equal shared parenting a good momentum building issues to address. This makes equal shared parenting a good issue to have as a flagship issue because it's benifits for women makes it hard to argue against.

2015-09-04T16:08:08+00:00

It's pretty heinous, but less so than false accusations , to me.

That's just me though...

Workchoices · 2015-09-04T17:24:55+00:00

Many of us do talk about it, but most of the people here are not criminals and haven't had any run ins with the law.

Its human nature to focus more on issues that affect or might affect you personally.

2015-09-04T22:28:38+00:00

It's not really the most important thing to protect the dignity of a criminal. There are a lot of more important issues, like sexual assault and violence against men, and family law inequality.

dontpet · 2015-09-04T23:50:29+00:00

I was pretty well educated in men's rights issues before I stumbled on Reddit and this sub.

This sub is where I learned about the issue and for my experience is frequently referred to. I've also noticed that the sentencing gap is referred to in other subs, probably through it being brought to light here.

Lurker_IV · 2015-09-05T07:40:03+00:00

I would take Mitschu's comment here and apply the first paragraph just to the criminal justice system in the US. While I know the sentencing gap is pretty much exactly the same in the UK and probably other First World Countries as well I will just focus on the US for now.

you're looking down at an iceberg from the bow asking how come nobody is talking about it, while ignoring that the ship is simultaneously cracked in half, burning down, being bombarded with cannon fire, getting rammed, being boarded by (apparently suicidal) pirates, and headed towards an iceberg.

The US has the largest proportion of imprisoned people than EVERY other country in the world. 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prisoners.

First we end the "War on Drugs", then we pardon everyone who was imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses. Next we take away Judge's ability to imprison anyone for child support delinquency. We decriminalize a bunch of other stuff and when we get to 5% of the world's population and 5% of the world's prisoners then we can get to dealing with the sentencing gap.

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