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[–]artetolife 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

one-third of the women in prison in the UK are in for failure to pay their BBC license fee

lol no. That sounds like something US conservatives pull out of their arse when they want to paint the UK as socialist hellhole. It's true that the majority of prosecutions are against women, but you don't get sent to prison for not paying the fee, only if you refuse to pay the fine when you get caught, and it's a tiny number of people each year.

[–]MarkTwainiac 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Yes, I misspoke! Thanks for correcting me, LOL. One-third of women's criminal convictions in the UK are for failure to pay the BBC license fee. And the only people who get jailed are those who are convicted and don't pay the fine.

But for the record, the figures came from the UK Ministry of Justice, not US conservatives, and the story didn't come out of anyone's arse - it was widely reported by mainstream British news organizations.

Also, the MoJ says there were 114,000 convictions for failure to pay the BBC license fee in 2019, and 121,000 convictions in 2018. In 2017, nearly 185,000 people were criminally prosecuted for failure to pay the license fee, and more than 164,000 were convicted. Those don't sound like "tiny" numbers to me. But that's just my opinion.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/26/third-female-convictions-uk-due-tv-licence-fee-evasion-moj-stats/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8992057/TV-licence-evasion-accounts-one-THREE-womens-criminal-convictions-new-figures-reveal.html

https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/27/one-of-three-womens-criminal-convictions-are-for-tv-licence-evasion-13664335/

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1365775/bbc-news-tv-licence-fee-latest-female-convictions-decriminalise-ministry-justice

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tv-licence-fee-women-convictions-b1763192.html

Point is, the MoJ datas shows that only one per cent - 1%! - of the almost 4,000 women in prison in the UK are there for violent offenses.

Some 20 women in England and Wales went to prison in 2015 over their TV licence, up from 11 the year before, revealed figures released by the Ministry of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4130060/More-women-men-jailed-TV-licenses.html

In 2017, 90 people in the UK who were convicted of not paying the TV fee were jailed for not paying the fine.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/07/17/70_pc_tv_licensing_convictions_women/

Given the small number of women in prison in England and Wales, and how often men convicted of violent crimes and offenses like being caught with computers full of child sex abuse images, the fact that any women would be jailed for failing to pay their TV license fee and associated fine - and such large numbers of women overall and relative to men are prosecuted for this in the first place -is IMO surprising and suggestive that the scales of justice might be a wee bit imbalanced.

Apparently, the government has put forward plans to decriminalize not paying the TV license fee - and to remove the possible jail penalty for not paying the fine.

https://inews.co.uk/news/media/tv-licence-fee-jail-threat-dropped-bbc-decriminalisation-394131

[–]VioletRemi 9 insightful - 5 fun9 insightful - 4 fun10 insightful - 5 fun -  (2 children)

Apparently, the government has put forward plans to decriminalize not paying the TV license fee - and to remove the possible jail penalty for not paying the fine.

So women crime rates would drop drastically? :D

[–]MarkTwainiac 11 insightful - 1 fun11 insightful - 0 fun12 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yup, women's crime rates would drop nearly one-third in one fell swoop.

The government best get on this fast, coz nowadays TIM's convictions for violent crimes and sex crimes are increasingly being recorded as women's crimes - which is giving the impression that there's a significant uptick of late in UK women engaging in crimes of violence and sex abuse.

Here are 71 such men: https://youtu.be/9NpIy-0_esU

[–]VioletRemi 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I don't remember what country that was, but there was some male specific crime, in which only 1 woman was convicted per year, and when 2 transwomen were recorded there, it was 200% raise of this crime rate for women :D