Purpose of the toolkit
Women are the fastest growing prison population across the world. As further outlined in this toolkit, poverty, discrimination, violence and a punitive legal responses are some of the key underlying causes behind the increase in female imprisonment. The harmful and negative impact of imprisonment on women, their families and communities has been widely documented.
Since the adoption of the United Nations Rules on the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules), which complements the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on Non-custodial Measures (the Tokyo Rules) and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), there has been increased attention on gender-responsive treatment of women in prison. This toolkit seeks to provide support and guidance on taking steps to ensure that women in contact with the law are not detained or imprisoned unnecessarily and that detention is used as a measure of last resort. The starting point for this toolkit is to take the least interventionist approach possible, acknowledging that in certain situations contact with the criminal justice system can be harmful to women.
The Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG 5 (achieve gender equality and empower all girls) and SDG 16.3 (equal access to justice for all) and the overarching objective of “leave no one behind”, will not be attained unless there is a transformative approach to the way that the criminal justice system responds to women and girls. This toolkit is designed to build on existing international instruments and resources, as well as regional and international best practices, in order to provide guidance on applying noncustodial measures to women in contact with the law as well as on gender-sensitive application of criminal laws, policies and procedures.
