A/HRC/41/33 in poverty have been extensively documented (see, for example, A/66/265). Links between economic and social inequalities and the criminal justice system can lead to trapping people in vicious cycles of poverty and criminalization. 31 Those cycles are aggravated in times of austerity, when social services are cut, and women are particularly affected because, owing to the feminization of economic deprivation, they rely more than men on Governments for legal, social, health and other services. Women’s access to services has also been reduced as a result of a rise in the negative stereotyping of poor people, and especially poor and racialized women, as attempting to “cheat the system” (ibid.). 32 52. Women are often imprisoned for crimes related to poverty, including theft and fraud, but also for infractions related to homelessness, poor living conditions, or to the struggle to earn a living, such as begging or street vending. In several States, women may also be at risk of civil conviction for their inability to pay their debts. In many jurisdictions, indigenous and racial minority women are not only more likely to be poorer than other women owing to intergenerational cycles of systemic oppression, but are also more likely to experience detention for issues such as the inability to pay off debts or petty offences such as theft. 53. Poverty shapes not only the crimes of which women are accused, but also their interactions with the criminal justice system, which also have an effect on the likelihood of their incarceration and its length. In particular, lack of income and wealth limits women’s access to quality legal representation, negatively impacting their ability to obtain favourable outcomes in the court system. It also limits their ability to post bail, which not only subjects them to pretrial detention, but has also been found to dramatically increase the likelihood of their eventual conviction (ibid., para. 66). Furthermore, once convicted and incarcerated, women often have less access than men to rehabilitation and reintegration services, owing to a scarcity of gender-responsive custodial services designed for women inmates and a paucity of alternative services outside prison. That sometimes leads to worse outcomes upon release, increases the risk of recidivism and may leave women in a cycle of incarceration. 54. Women’s lack of access to resources and services is also a factor in other forms of deprivation of liberty. Poverty may be a driver of family decisions to accept child, early and forced marriages when girls are viewed as an economic burden to be “offloaded” to another family. That understanding, and a lack of access to adequate community-based support services, may also contribute to family decisions to confine women and girls with disabilities to institutions. There have also been troubling trends of “medical detention” of women who lack the ability to pay for health services in hospitals, mostly after giving birth, which has become part of hospital policies and/or practice in some jurisdictions, as documented in several African and Asian countries, including Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Indonesia. 33 55. Older women without resources or livelihoods are often neglected by their families and find themselves involuntarily isolated in the home or in a care facility. Care facilities have been known to abuse or neglect residents through denying them the ability to move about freely, denying them contact with the outside world and withholding basic necessities such as food, health services, and recreational activities. 2. Lack of opportunity and choice 56. Poverty for women is not only a matter of material wealth and social services, but fundamentally a question of the choices they are able to make for their lives. Women have less access to decent work, may be restricted as to which fields they can work in and how high they can rise within those fields, while being responsible for a disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work. The gender opportunity gap starts early, with 31 32 33 Vanita Gupta, “Keynote remarks,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law, vol. 21, No. 2 (2016). See also Kaaryn Gustafson, “The criminalization of poverty,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 99, No. 3 (2009). See Robert Yates, Tom Brookes and Eloise Whitaker, “Hospital detentions for non-payment of fees. A denial of rights and dignity”, Royal Institute of International Affairs (2017). 13