IT’S easy to be outraged by the court case of Lavinia Woodward, the Oxford medical student who punched and stabbed her boyfriend with a breadknife while under the influence of drugs. The judge, who has deferred sentence, said she would probably not be going to prison and described her as an “extraordinary able young lady”. He expressed a desire not to prevent her from “following her long-held desire to enter the profession she wishes to”.

What could be a more troubling indictment of the way our culture favours the few over the many, the elite over the rest, than an Oxford student walking free following a stabbing? It’s not surprising, therefore that Twitter and went wild over Woodward's case, though reporting of the details was fairly minimal. We learned little more than the fact that her barrister had said that she had struggled with drug addiction and been abused by a former partner. People were incensed, nevertheless, at the idea that Lavinia Woodward had been apparently let off simply because she was too clever, too much of an elite star. “Is this the rise of punishment by merit?” wrote Verity Ryan in The Telegraph. “Only those with the least talent and potential should suffer the inconvenience of paying for their crimes.”

So it was that Woodward's case emerged as the injustice of the week. Yet perhaps commentators were focusing on the wrong issue. Too often, there was outrage at the fact Woodward had been allowed to walk free – lock her up, many seemed to think – rather than the bigger question of whether others, from more deprived backgrounds, were getting the same kinds of consideration for their futures.

The judge, effectively, was giving Lavinia Woodward a chance. When he deferred sentencing, he took advantage of a mechanism by which the defendant can be observed post-conviction to see if they are making genuine efforts at rehabilitation.

And we do need to give people a chance. Woodward is being processed by the English criminal justice system, which shares a problem with our own: the UK has the highest prison population in Europe. Far too many people are being sent into overcrowded prisons. And research shows that those given custodial rather than community-based sentences, are more likely to reoffend.

A recent Prison Reform Trust report on the shockingly high levels of female imprisonment in Scotland, observed: “An over-reliance on remand and on short custodial sentences which fail to tackle the underlying causes of offending, continues to draw women into the criminal justice system and keep them there.”

What this tells us is that too few people are being given a chance; that too often prison is being used as a holding space for vulnerable people who are themselves at risk. The problem is not that we’re failing to throw posh, violent, white women with drug issues into prison, it’s that too many people from less privileged backgrounds are ending up there for similar, or less grave, crimes.

I can’t help wondering if Woodward would have received similar consideration had she been poor or from an ethnic minority. Last year the Lammy Review into the treatment of ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system in England and Wales, published research showing that ethnic minorities were more likely than white people to get prison sentences.

Would Woodward have received a deferred sentence if she’d been a Somalian refugee, struggling to raise a son and study to be a nurse while suffering from mental health problems as a result of PTSD? That was the situation Zoe, a young woman I met a few months ago, had been in when she was remanded in Cornton Vale to await trial for assault. Ultimately, Zoe received a community-based sentence, but not before she'd already spent three weeks in prison, during which time she lost her home, her potential career, and her son into foster care.

Remand is one of the ways in which the justice system throws those in need of support into nightmarish situations that exacerbate their chances of reoffending.

Critics of the Woodward judgement are right: this is about class and race inequality. Such inequality is a thread that weaves its way through our justice system and the rest of society – you are less likely to be imprisoned, arrested, or experience the chain of events that leads to all of that, if you’re middle-class and white. But that doesn’t mean the judge was wrong to suggest a way in which Woodward might avoid a prison sentence.

We do need to give people a chance. Woodward, therefore, is a reminder of why we still need to push for further justice reform, and more services to address problems like poor mental health and drug and alcohol use. She shouldn’t be the poster girl for making sure posh, white women get banged up. Rather, she should be the reminder of why, in so many cases, the poor, ethnic minorities, those with mental health issues, and drug dependencies, should not.