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Louise over at the Harpy Marx blog can be relied upon to consistently champion the poor and disadvantaged, and although it is unfashionable on the left nowadays she is very dogged in her commitment to those who suffer in the criminal justice system.
Sometimes however I think that her commendable compassion can lead her to overlook the big picture, and by only looking at the issue from the point of view of the offender, she downplays the public policy necessity of combating crime, and the need for providing expression and emotional closure for the victims of crime.
Anyway, it seems that there is a move in the USA for public shaming as an alternative to gaol, and Louise is understandably concerned
The facts of the latest case, as reported in the press,are that a nine year old child mislaid two gift vouchers in Walmart. Two women found them, and although they admitted they contemplated handing them in, they used them instead. They lied to a store clerk and said the cards were theirs, even though they had the child’s name on them, the clerk had asked them because the loss had been reported to the store. They then returned on a second occasion and tried to use them again.
It seems from their comments to the press that the two women – a mother and daughter – believed in the principle of “finders keepers”, and as such may have had a different moral compass for such a situation from the social norm.
Clearly there are many problematic aspects to this form of punishment. Generally, it is located within a punitive American ethos that tilts towards right wing populism, and is less concerned with what works than what plays well to the tabloid press. Paradoxically, the American system is also very poor at providing support for victims of crime, due to its bureaucratic and dispassionate nature. Plea bargaining is very disempowering from the point of view of victim involvement, as it reduces the process of justice to a professional, bureaucratic conveyor belt to deliver people into prison as cheaply and quickly as possible.
The American criminal justice system fails badly by not seeking to reduce crime through social intervention to alleviate underlying social problems and fails to provide help to those at risk of being tempted into crime.
More specifically, such “imaginative” punishments could be rather arbitrary, and are arguably contrary to the spirit of the Common Law prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishments, and thus also unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.
The most effective criminal justice system in the world is Finland’s: although all of the Scandinavian countries have low incarceration rates; lower anxiety levels about crime; and lower crime levels than those countries in Europe with much larger prison populations (particularly Portugal, Spain and the UK). Although there is a public perception of rising crime, in fact every Western European state has recorded falling levels of crime over the last 20 years, and this is not because “prison works”, as the UK with its expanding prison populations has been one of the least effective at cutting crime.
Central to the Finnish experience has been a concerted drive to lower prison population; partly through a flexible strategy including measures like part-time prison sentences (very effective in allowing prisoners to continue working and supporting their families while still losing liberty every weekend); but also through programmes to reduce drug dependency, and to resolve underlying motors towards crime. Reducing prison numbers frees up resources for social measures to combat crime – more social workers, more help in finding employment opportunities, etc.
But the most innovative aspects have been the victim/offender mediation programmes. Despite right wing populism from politicians in the UK praising prison, the reality of our criminal justice system is impersonal and alienating for victims, who often receive no sense of justice. Sara Payne has said as much today in her report which, according to the BBC, argues that justice is currently defined only as “catching the criminal and protecting the public”, and victims and witnesses feel they are included simply to aid that process. Sara Payne recommends that in future delivering justice should be about supporting the victim to overcome the impact of the crime so they can get on with their lives.
The Finnish system seeks to find a resolution acceptable to the victim, which is restorative rather than punitive. Mediation and restitution forces the offender to see the crime from the perspective of the victim; it also provides an emotionally effective outlet for the victim to express anger and grief; only if mediation fails does the case move further through the criminal justice system.
So what should socialists advocate as a criminal justice policy? Firstly we need to recognise that crime matters. Not only does it blight people’s lives, but it is also a moral transgression of our common humanity. In his book ”Crime Control as Industry, Towards Gulags Western Style” the criminologist Nils Christie quotes the father of American sociology, Charles H Cooley, who argued that this common humanity is rooted in our shared social experience of dependency in childhood. We have all been vulnerable, and we would all have died had we not been cared for and nurtured by others. People look after one another: that is our social nature. Criminality is a socially defined and codified expression of what behaviour we regard as a betrayal of that common bond.
An important driver towards criminality is therefore misperception of what the social norms are. Quite often people self-justify criminal and anti-social behaviour by believing that most other people would approve or behave the same way. There is a specific related problem where sub-cultures of mutual support and motivation build up, most obviously around issues like child sexual abuse or terrorism. Some rare individuals also exhibit sociopath behaviour, where they have an instrumental view of other human beings as being merely tools to be manipulated.
Crime prevention therefore needs to reinforce socially expected norms; and the exemplary value of punishment needs to be recognised as beneficial. Alienation from moral norms also explains why those most susceptible to criminal and anti-social behaviour are relative outsiders – the very rich, the very poor and the young who have not yet developed a stake in stability. Sadly the rich are protected both because they have political influence and much of their anti-social behaviour is not illegal; and where they do actually break the law their wealth often helps them escape justice.
In pre-industrial societies village justice was personal and contextualised by a history of shared experience; they inherited the legal customs, but their deliberations were norm clarifications for each novel situation. This traditional approach could be oppressive, and unfair towards lower status members of the community, but also sometimes surprisingly lenient and reconciliatory. It was also unable to deal effectively with outsiders. Observing a different moral code for within your own community, while having a different set of rules for strangers, is characteristic of some forms of modern criminality with a heritage from the pre-modern period - for example the mafia; and while not necessarily associated with criminality such enclosed moral communities are also encountered among travellers.
As King’s justice replaced the village, ecclesiastic and baronial courts, and as Common Law homogenised and mediated the King’s arbitrary power, the unfairness became an institutional bias in favour of wealth and power; but the rule of law encouraged a national scope to norms of behaviour; and obeying the law became a shared moral expectation even among strangers, not just something you did to avoid trouble.
That moral expectation towards being law-abiding survives, but the legal system has become bureaucratised, and transformed into an “prison-industrial complex”. Justice has become subordinated to homogenisation and judgement and discretion reduced and replaced by management efficiency. Paradoxically, John Major’s call to “understand a little less, and condemn a little more” is corrosive to respect for the law, because understanding why people commit crime is vital if we are to develop policies to reinforce positive social norms, and the depersonalisation of punishment reduces its effectiveness. Condemnation is rarely the primary concern of victims, who have more prosaic worries, and need to understand and come to terms with that has happened to them.
Socialists should certainly favour identifying and helping people likely to commit crime before they do so; we are correct to argue that reducing poverty, and promoting equality will lessen the drivers towards crime. More self-respect, more hope for the future, more sense of security; all these things help people to stay out of trouble. Reducing the prison population would help fund these effective crime prevention measures.
However, some people will still commit crime; and they should be punished. People being punished need to be treated humanely and with respect, and rehabilitated. That is why we oppose the privatisation of the prison service – the profit motive requires running costs to be reduced, but this contradicts the fact that the wider social cost is best reduced by ensuring that prisoners have the best chance of not reoffending - which may mean spending more per prisoner, not less.
The public humiliation of these women has problematic aspects, it certainly falls short of the ideal of treating offenders with respect and dignity: but it is not really an outrage. It is a good idea to explore alternatives to prison; it has received widespread media coverage to reinforce the moral norm that stealing is wrong; and the individual women are unlikely to reoffend. They have avoided prison, and therefore there will be less disruption of their personal support networks. There is also some public catharsis that people who stole from a child have been made to confront what they did.
It is not a policy that socialists should advocate, but in the context of the American penal system with its presumption towards depersonalised incarceration, it is at least an attempt to think creatively about what punishment is effective in preventing crime. While the right wing have a knee-jerk support for prison, it would be a mistake for the left to have a knee-jerk reaction that gives the impression we don’t think offenders should be punished at all.
I am pleased to see that the Howard League for Penal Reform has launched a fund to commemorate the campaigning work of Pauline Campbell who died last year, and whose only daughter Sarah had died in prison.
43 women prisoners have committed suicide during the last 5 years, and two so far in 2009. One of these latest deaths was in Styal, a gaol repeatedly plagued by suicides, and criticised yet again last month by the Chief Inspector of Prisons. The young woman who killed herself had only been sentenced to 28 days for theft, but hanged herself on the first night.
Frankly the state is failing in its duty of care to vulnerable people being sent to prison. the new fund will pay for an advert in a national newspaper each time a woman or girl dies in prison.
Forwarded on behalf of the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
Call Canaan Federal Prison
570-488-8000
Dear LP Supporters,I am so OUTRAGED! My brother Leonard was severely beaten upon his arrival at the Canaan Federal Penitentiary. When he went into population after his transfer, some inmates assaulted him. The severity of his injuries is that he suffered numerous blows to his head and body, receiving a large bump on his head, possibly a concussion, and numerous bruises. Also, one of his fingers is swollen and discolored and he has pain in his chest and ribcage. There was blood everywhere from his injuries. We feel that prison authorities at the prompting of the FBI orchestrated this attack and thus, we are greatly concerned about his safety. It may be that the attackers, whom Leonard did not even know, were offered reduced sentences for carrying out this heinous assault. Since Leonard is up for parole soon, this could be a conspiracy to discredit a model prisoner. He was placed in solitary confinement and only given one meal, this is generally done when you won’t name your attackers; incidentally being only given one meal seriously jeopardizes his health because of his diabetes. Prison officials refuse to release any info to the family, but they need to hear from his supporters to protect his safety, as does President Obama. His attorneys are trying to get calls into him now.
This attack on LP comes on the heels of the FBI’s recent letter, prompting this attack by FBI supporters as an attempt to discredit LP as a model prisoner. Anyone who has been in the prison system knows well that if you refuse to name your attackers or file charges against them, then you lose your status as a victim and/or given points against your possible parole and labeled as a perpetrator. It is not uncommon, in fact is quite common for the government to use Indian against Indian and they still operate under the old adage “it takes an Indian to catch an Indian”. In 1978, they made an attempt to assassinate him through another Indian man who was also at Marion prison with LP. But Standing Deer chose to reveal the plot to him instead of taking his life in exchange FOR A CHANCE AT FREEDOM. When Standing Deer was released in 2001, he joined the former Leonard Peltier Defense Committee as a board member. He also began to speak on Leonard’s behalf until his murder six years ago today. Prior to his murder, Standing Deer confided with close friends and associates that the same man who visited him in Marion to assassinate Peltier, had came to Houston, TX and told him that he had better stay away from Peltier and anything to do with him.
We are aware that currently, the FBI is actively seeking support for his continued imprisonment of Leonard Peltier and also also seeking support from Native People. So please be aware, and keep Leonard in your prayers. The FBI is apparently afraid of the impact we are having. If they will set him up to blemish his record just before a parole hearing, what will they do when it looks like his freedom will become a reality? We need to make sure that nothing happens to him again!
Please write the President, send it priority or registered mail. Email to Change.gov or email President Obama. Call your congressional representatives and write letters, not email, to them. Do what you can to get the word out to insure that LP is receiving adequate medical attention for his injuries.
I am asking you, supporters of Leonard and advocates of justice at this time to help. I don’t know what else to do. Please Help!
Thank you Betty Peltier-Solano Executive Coordinator Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
Also call and request Leonard be treated with dignity and respect.
Canaan Federal Prison
570-488-8000
Leonard’s prisoner number is 89637-132. (more…)
Today is Prisoners Justice Day. A day to remember to mourn the people who have died in prison and a day to fight for the rights of the living. The No More Prison campaign has organised a protest outside Styal prison @ 1pm to show support and solidarity to the women locked all over the UK and to remember the women who have died in state custody.
It is also a tribute to Pauline Campbell who died in May of this year (whose daughter, Sarah, died in Styal). She was a tireless and courageous campaigner for penal reform including highlighting the number of deaths of women in prisons.
Unfortunately, I can’t get to it this year and am really sorry that I can’t. I wish all the protesters good luck and see you next year. And hope the rain holds off!
A conference on the 16th August organised in connection with Prisoners Justice Day is on, The Queer, Feminist & Trans Politics of Prison Abolition. Workshops include:
Why prisons don’t make our communities safer
The social costs of prisons for women, transfolk and queers
Building links between feminist / queer / trans anti-violence work and prison abolition
Drawing connections between prison abolition and other social justice struggles, such as border activism and immigration detention, anti-racism and anticolonial struggles, antipoverty and homelessness work
Resistance to the “war on terror”, ending psychiatric abuse, fair wages for workers & fighting corporate irresponsibility
Alternatives to punishment and imprisonment
How to build communities without prisons
The conference is from 1-5pm Saturday August 16, 2008 @ the Arbour Youth Centre -100 Shandy Street, London E1 4ST (Stepney Green or Mile End Tube stop)
Today, Frances Done, the new head of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales gave her first media interview to the BBC. The Youth Justice Board (YJB) is a public body that oversees the youth justice system in England and Wales.
Currently there are about 2,900 10 to 17-year-olds locked up in secure children’s homes, secure training centres and young offender institutions, in England and Wales.
The salient fact is that incarceration is not effective at reducing youth crime. Edinburgh University’s study of Youth Transitions and Crime tracked 4300 children over eight years. It found that those youngsters who have contact with the Criminal Justice System are less likely to stop offending than those who don’t. Or as Alastair Duff, Sherriff for Tayside Central and Fife describes it:
“What I have found over the years is that most of them give up committing crime and they give up not for reasons associated with the way the criminal justice system has dealt with them. Rather they give up because of a change in their lives elsewhere …. Usually it is some other factor … they finally get a job where they didn’t have a job, they meet a good woman, or their granny dies or some other life event that sort of brings them up short. … They grow up and out of it”
It is very clear from the statistics that the underlying social problems that lead people into crime are related to drug and drink dependency, mental distress, having run away from home as a child, lack of qualifications and homelessness.
In particular with youth crime, once the social factors are removed or ameliorated, then crime decreases. But imprisonment actually decreases the chances of the underlying problems being addressed. This is true both at an individual level, as a prison record carries a stigma for future employment, and some youngsters also find some self definition as being a criminal. It is also true at a societal level, as the huge cost of the prison-industrial complex diverts public funds away from preventative measures.
It is good news that Frances Done has said she is determined to “drive the numbers down”. She wants the courts to make greater use of community penalties.
But it is worrying that she argues that the way to do this is to “ensure that judges and magistrates felt confident that community sentences were “robust” enough alternatives to locking people up.”
This still seems to be making an assumption that a prison sentence is normative and any alternative must be judged against imprisonment, rather that approaching the question of how young people can be steered away from crime by whatever is the most effective way. We should not be judging sentances by their “robustness” but by their effectiveness in crime reduction.
We have to recognise that there is a strong cultural presumption towards prison in England and Wales as being an appropriate response to crime. However, the explosion in prison numbers has been very specifically within the last twenty years, and mainly under the current Labour government.
When Labour came to Government in May 1997, the prison population in England and Wales was 60,131, in February 2008 the prison population was 82020. Previously it took four decades (1954-1994) for the prison population to rise by 25,000, The Labour Party have managed to increase the numbers by nearly 22000 in just ten years.
The number of women in prison has increased particularly dramatically under Labour. In 1994 the average female prison population was 1,811. Five years later in 1999 it stood at 3,247. In February 2008 there were 4479 Women prisoners.
What is interesting is that other European countries, that have similar social and demographic characteristics to England and Wales both imprison far fewer people, and also have less crime. England and Wales is the prison capital of the European Union with a record average incarceration rate of 141, per 100,000 of the population, according to official Home Office figures. The figures, published in the world prison population list, show that England and Wales is even outstripping the imprisonment rate of Libya, Burma, Malaysia and Turkey.
A parliamentary answer recently revealed that of the 96,017 people sentenced to prison in 2006, 62% received a sentence of six months or less (Hansard, 28 January 2008; column 137w). These people receiving short sentences would be ideal candidates for alternatives to prison, that would be more cost effective, and better aimed at reducing crime.
With specific regard to young offenders, the underlying social problems of homelessness, drugs and substance abuse, personality disorders, bullying, exclusion from school, parental abuse etc need to be addressed at source.
There is evidence that young people hanging around are likely to come into contact wiith the police. But where are young people to go? There are simply not enough facilities available for young people, at an affordable price, to keep them amused and out of trouble. The government’s Respect agenda demands that young people respect their elders, but doesn’t honour their own side of the contract: young people are not respected or provided for.
With regard to the concern that knife crime may lead to more young people being sent to prison, there is indeed a good left case for compulsory imprisonment for carrying knives or guns. As Tommy Sheridan argues, sending people to prison for long terms for having used a knife is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted: it is carrying the weapons that leads to them being used.
Sheridan says: “I don’t accept the so called knife carrying “culture”. It is an anti-social cancer and should be referred to as such. Of course, mandatory sentences for knife carrying or longer sentences for knife use in and of themselves ill do little to tackle the cancer of violence. We need a multi faceted approach that involves a full frontal assault on poverty and hopelessness and the anger it spawns. Every community requires readily accessible and appropriate facilities to host constructive recreational pursuits….. If such an investment strategy were married to concerted education campaigns utilising schools, colleges, the media and peer idols in the fields of music, film and sports then we could establish knife carrying as the completely unacceptable practice it is. The socialist movement has zero tolerance of racism, domestic violence and sexism. Zero tolerance of violence and the practise of knife carrying has to be added to that list.”
The important question that Sheridan is addressing here, is that it is appropriate to use prison as an effective tool for enforcing a highly desirable shift in public behaviour; but to be effective then the sanction of prison must be narrowly targeted to only specific crimes related mainly to public safety, and must also be linked to a commitment to addressing the underlying social and individual causes of crime.
Read more about prisons at Harpy Marx
The MP John McDonnell has put forward this EDM in tribute and in memory of Pauline Campbell.
PAULINE CAMPBELL
05.06.2008
McDonnell, John
That this House notes with sadness the passing away of Pauline Campbell, a tireless, brave and committed campaigner who highlighted the shocking number of deaths of women within the prison system; further notes that since the death of her daughter, Sarah Campbell, who died in Styal Prison of a self-inflicted death in 2003, Pauline was a dedicated activist who fought to improve the treatment of women within the criminal justice system; and therefore resolves to continue Pauline’s campaign to argue for a urgent and radical change in the way women are treated throughout the criminal justice system and in particular, to call for a fundamental redesign of custody whereby custodial sentences for offenders should primarily be reserved for serious and violent offenders.
Yesterday, Justice Secretary Jack Straw revealled that the new Titan Prisons will be designed to be overcrowded. The four- or five-storey “titans” should provide at least 2,100 uncrowded places with the capacity to hold up to 2,500 prisoners “through planned overcrowding”.
Today’s Morning Star reports Prison Officers union leader, Brian Caton, being scathing about the idea: “Planned overcrowding is very similar to piling up pallets in a warehouse right up to the yellow safety line because you do not have any more space. … … You can warehouse prisoners if all you want to do is store them and hope they rehabilitate themselves, but this is crass stupidity. Even the Victorians didn’t crowd prisoners like this”
The truth is that the Criminal Justice system in England and Wales, and the Criminal Justice system in Scotland are both failing.
It is certainly failing in terms of human cost, as Louise Whittle has eloquently documented through both the tragic death of Pauline Campbell, and the incidence of self harm. I strongly recommend readers of SU blog to regularly check out Louise’s new blog for further updates on these issues. Incidently, as Louise has pointed out before self harm is a much bigger problem among women prisoners, because although the absolute number of self harmers is the same for men and women, there are far fewer women prisoners, so the relative incidence is much higher. This is all linked to issues of self esteem among women prisoners, and the general issues of women’s oppression in society.
I don’t have the comparable statistics for England and Wales, but to put the shocking level of suicides in Scottish prisons in perspective, Clive Fairweather, the former Chief Inspector of Scottish prisons, reports that during his 8 year term of office there were 137 suicides, whereas in the whole twentieth century there were only 33 executions in Scotland, prior to the death penalty being abolished in 1963.
But our Criminal Justice systems are also failing to address crime, and the causes of crime. It is very clear from the statistics that the underlying social problems that lead people into crime are related to drug and drink dependency, mental distress, having run away from home as a child, lack of qualifications and homelessness.
A multi-agency approach to identify people at risk and seek to overcome their social exclusion would be more cost effective than prison. Indeed more than half of prisoners are serving sentences under six months, and these sentences are too short for the prison service to address any of their underlying problems or provide any structured rehabilitation.
Re-offending rates among offenders are high - about two thirds are reconvicted within two years of release. Among men aged 18-21 the rate is about three quarters. And how could it be otherwise: accommodation problems are common - nearly one in three will not have somewhere to live upon release.
A majority of prisoners will have no job to go to and six out of 10 employers automatically exclude those with a criminal record. Clive Fairweather observes that having a prison record will affect your whole life, as it has a greater stigma than before and will have a lasting impact on your employment and prosperity.
There needs to be a complete re-think of sentencing policy to reduce the numbers in prison, in order to effectively deal with the problem of crime.
In particular we need to learn from other European countries that have far fewer people in prison, and a lower crime rate. Reducing the numbers sent to prison for short sentences, and concentrating instead on curfews, community service orders and other alternatives to prison, including a multi-agency approach to help solving the social problems that lead to people offending.
This would leave fewer people in prison, for those individuals where the pre-sentancing assesments indicate they represent a genuine danger to the public, or where for public policy reasons it is necessary to make a very clear signal of social disapproval.
Reducing overcrowding would make it easier to detain people nearer their families, and provide training, drug rehabilitation, and if therapy and help.
Crime and anti-social behaviour are big issues in working class communities, and left wing and progressive policies that take the problems seriously, but which don’t rely upon the failed policy of more and more inhumane prisons could shift the terms of the debate, and could even be popular.
I attended the funeral today of Pauline Campbell at Whitchurch, Shropshire. And I was able to put names to faces as many have commented on this blog and to say hello. Special thanks to Nikki, Hannah, Emilia and the two Johns.
Sorry I couldn’t stay to raise a toast in celebration and in rememberance of Pauline’s life.
There were tributes from her friends and organisations like Howard League’s Frances Crook, INQUEST and from Eric Allison who wrote the obituary to Pauline in the Guardian.
Eric made the point that we have a duty to carry on highlighting and campaigning around deaths of women in prison. The criminal justice system has to stop sending vulnerable and damaged women to prison. Pauline was described as a suffragette of penal reform and that is a fitting description.
I saw Pauline’s friend, Joan, who accompanied her to the pre-trial review in March and where I met her. She is a heroic and brave woman in her own right and was glad to see her.
It was sad and poignant day. I knew Pauline for only a short time yet she made an impact on my life. I admired her tenacity and bravery. My feelings are best summed up by the words on the banner at the top of this post.
The reality of NL’s authoritarian policies have so much grief and misery, which have led to the deaths of a woman and her daughter. I agree with Eric, we need to carry on the campaign for Pauline’s sake and for the women who have died in the “care” of the state. We need to carry on highlighting and campaigning about these hidden injustices.
Prison Justice Day is on the 10th August - It is a day in which those in prison can have a day of mourning and rememberance for others who have died while locked up in prison. History of the day can be found here.
No More Prison campaign are asking for activists to show solidarity outside Styal Prison with the women locked up inside and to remember those who have died in women’s prisons all over the country. It will also be a tribute to Pauline.
The demo will start at 1pm outside the gates of the prison. Please show your support and solidarity.
Yesterday, Plaid Cymru spokesperson on crime, Leanne Wood AM, appeared on the BBC’s politics show to launch her new paper from the Plaid Cymru Policy Development Unit, “Making our Communities Safer” (Cymunedau Mwy Diogel), which provides both a devastating attack on New Labour’s failures, and also develops a progressive set of policies towards community protection and crime that should receive wide attention from the left.
What is particularly welcome about Leanne’s paper is that is recognises the degree to which New Labour’s policies on crime are driven by a shamelessly populist approach: “New Labour has prioritised crime because focus groups simplistically tell them that it’s the voters’ main concern, and it is an easy subject to attract headlines.”
Criminalising Young People
New Labour has a distinctly “communitarian” agenda of promoting social conformity, and seeking to criminalise those who don’t fit in. Whereas New Labour is adept at triangulating around the concerns of swing voters in marginal constituencies, within their traditional heartlands they play a distinctly right wing strategy of playing up fears of crime, and demonising young people and immigrants. For example in the forthcoming Crewe by-election, Labour are officially promoting the line “Tories Soft on Yobs, Tamsin Dunwoody [the Labour candidate] knows what is takes to make our streets safer. Tamsin Dunwoody wants the police to harass yobs, and get in their faces.”
New Labour has systematically sought to criminalise young people, as Plaid’s document describes:
New Labour has created over 700 new offences since 1997. People are being criminalised for things now that their parents and grandparents got away with. Children are now dealt with more harshly than adults. There appear to be numerous instances where incidents that used to be regarded as normal adolescent behaviour fifteen or twenty years ago are
now being seen as low-level criminal activity. Young people are receiving ASBOs for playing football in the wrong place, loud music or loud behaviour disturbing neighbours. … …In October 2006 there were 3,350 children and young people locked up in England and Wales, twice the number imprisoned ten years earlier. Yet the British Crime Survey (BCS), which asks young people themselves whether they have offended in the past twelve months (what is known as ‘self-report methodology’) shows that levels of crime committed have been static for the past five years. There has been a disproportionate increase in the numbers of girls and boys from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds sent to prison
But as the recently resigned Chair of the Youth Justice Board, Rod Morgan, has said:
“We know that criminalising young children … is generally counter-productive, indeed criminogenic [crime-causing]. Yet what are we doing? We’re criminalising more children and young people – 26% more in the last three years””
Crime and Punishment:
Right across Europe there has been a drop in crime.
The UN Crime Prevention Agency’s recent EU Crime and Safety Survey (2007) shows that despite falls in crime levels throughout Europe since 1995, UK crime rates have not dropped as fast as those across the rest of the EU. The UK is named alongside Ireland, Estonia, the Netherlands and Denmark as the crime hotspots of Europe with crime victim rates that are at least 30% higher than the EU average. The study concludes that no single factor can explain the drop in crime across Europe over the past ten years, but that a fall in the proportion of young males and improved security measures such as burglar and car alarms are probably more influential than tough sentencing policies or rising prison populations
The near doubling of the prison population under New Labour creates a raft of social problems, and if anything increases the chances of reoffending. Two thirds of adult prisoners re-offend, while a higher proportion of the youth prison population are repeatedly arrested after release, mainly for committing offences linked to a substance use problem.
The prison population has ballooned from 47,000 in 1993 to more than 80,000 today. The British Crime Survey reports that crime peaked in 1995, and has since then fallen by 42%. There have been large decreases in burglary and vehicle thefts over the last ten years (burglary down 59%, vehicle thefts down 61%) and also in violent crime (down 43%). The risk of becoming a victim of crime is now 24% compared with 40% in 1995. The 10% increase in vandalism in 2006/07 masks an overall 11% decrease since 1995. Crime statistics stabilized in 2006/07
These increased sentences do not correspond to any rational crime prevention strategy. For example, the women’s prison population has doubled in the last decade. At Crown Court in 1991, only 8% of women convicted of motoring offences went to prison, by 2001 that proportion had increased to 42%. At Magistrates’ Court, the chances of a woman receiving a custodial sentence have increased seven fold.
According to the Prison Reform Trust, the prison population has a dramatically higher incidence of personality disorders than the general population. 72% of the male adult prison population have two or more mental disorders. Nearly two-thirds of sentenced male prisoners and two-fifths of sentenced female prisoners admit to hazardous drinking, Just over a quarter of male prisoners and about a fifth of female prisoners who are hazardous drinkers are dependent on at least one type of illicit drug.
Yet these prisoners are typically rotated around through the prison system with a succession of short sentences, and insufficient time or opportunity for probation services to deal with emotional issues, drug addiction or education.
Being sent to prison is usually a personal catastrophe in terms of jobs, housing, family stability and all the other networks and support structures that prevent people offending; yet overcrowding in prisons leads to prisoners often being incarcertated far away from their family, with less visits. The vindictive move by Gordon Brown to personally refuse a pay rise to prisoners means that they are less able to pay for phone cards and keep in touch with their families, again weakening the support networks that may prevent reoffending.
New Labour’s policy seems to be entirely driven by Daily Express editorials, rather than any real desire to reduce the human misery caused by crime.
Prison doesn’t work. Edinburgh University’s study of Youth Transitions and Crime tracked 4300 children over eight years. It found that those youngsters who have contact with the Criminal Justice System are less likely to stop offending than those who don’t.
Crime and Fear
One of the biggest problems is the disproportionate fear of crime. According to Leanne Wood, in every British Crime Survey since 1995 overall crime figures have fallen, yet in the 2006-07 survey 65% of people thought that crime in the UK as a whole had increased compared with 41% who thought crime in their local area had increased.
Poly Toynbee offers an explanation for this discrepancy: “A vast industry of mendacity has a vested interest in scaring people witless with front-page shock, TV cops and doom-laden moral panic editorials”
As Pat Devine and others have written, our society has an epidemic of unhappiness and “ontological insecurity” – fear without cause. They quote Layard who writes: “A society cannot flourish without some sense of shared purpose. The current pursuit of self-realisation will not work. If your sole duty is to achieve the best for yourself, life becomes just too stressful, too lonely - you are set up to fail”.
But this individualism, and floundering pointlessness is the empty heart of New Labour. The endless facile charade of spin and bright shiny new initiatives that change nothing, and have no purpose other than grabbing yet another headline.
Tackling the Causes of Crime
Leanne Wood argues that “The causes of crime are varied: poverty, substance abuse, a lack of youth provision, neglected mental health problems. It can be a combination of all these, or none of them. Bereavement or abuse can trigger problems that lead to criminal behaviour. It’s also true to say many people experience some or all of these things, but do not go on to offend.”
But significantly Plaid Cymru also contends that New Labour’s flawed ‘Respect’ agenda is also a cause of criminality.
The Government has introduced targets where the police have to bring a total of 1.25 million cases to justice every year. The number of adults convicted has remained static, but the police exceed their target by arresting young people: they are easy to catch and their cases are easy to process. Rod Morgan says that, for the police, arresting children is like ’picking low-hanging fruit’
Yet many of these crimes are only committed because young people are “hanging around”, with no youth provision in many areas, and where it is provided it is often private and expensive.
But New labour demonises children and young people. A recent report by UNICEF found that children in the UK suffer greater deprivation, worse relationships with their parents and are exposed to more risks from alcohol, drugs and unsafe sex than those in any other wealthy country in the world. In response to this report, England’s Children’s Commissioner Al Aynsley-Green said that: “It’s time to stop demonising children and young people for what goes wrong and start supporting them to make positive choices. To bring an end to the confusing messages we give to young people about their role, responsibility and position in society and ensure that every child feels valued and respected”
The “Respect” agenda has played to Alf Garnett prejudices, and demanded more respect by young people for their elders, without requiring or expecting any mutual respect from older people towards the young: who are feared, demonised, and assumed to be up to no good.
Plaid’s suggestions
As part of a progressive agenda for restoring community values, crime and anti-social behaviour does need to be tackled. These are the suggestions from plaid Cymru that should receive serious debate and consideration by the labour movement in the whole of Britain.
Reducing the prison population will free up resources to invest in public sector community rehabilitation and for those in prison there should be meaningful offending behaviour programmes.
The creation of a Youth Justice Board and consideration of the Finnish youth justice system as a model. Finland has a very small number of children in custody. Instead there is a wide variety of psychiatric provision to deal with behavioural problems at an early stage.
Expanding Social Service Departments to carry out more preventative work. Networks of child counsellors could be employed to work alongside an expanded Child and Adult Mental Health Service (CAMHS).
Replacing ASBOs with a system of restorative justice, mentoring and conferencing.
A twenty year substance use strategy, focussing on harm reduction and including multidisciplinary substance use teams working with criminal justice agencies on individually designed care plans. Problematic substance users should be treated as patients. Primary school children should receive harm reduction education, with an emphasis on the promotion of mental wellbeing and suicide/self-harm prevention.
A generational strategy to tackle hate or power-based crime. The primary school curriculum should contain ‘relationships education’ which aims to challenge and change early signs of sexist, racist, homophobic and bullying or abusive attitudes. It should also cover questions of sexual health, contraception, domestic abuse and sexual consent.
Protecting children from adult violence through the ending of the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’. Adults convicted of smacking children in their care should be sentenced to parenting skills/social work intervention.
A comprehensive strategy to reduce fear of crime through investment in facilities for young people, youth support workers and a citizens’ public service scheme to bridge the gap between older and younger generations and the need to ‘hang around on street corners’.
Crime and Devolution.
It is perhaps worth pointing out how responsibility for criminal justice is a potential constitutional flashpoint. For example in Scotland, the SNP government wish to introduce a ban on air guns. (In March 2005, two-year-old Andrew Morton was killed by an airgun as he played near his house in Easterhouse, Glasgow. In the past eight years, 11154 Scots have been injured by these weapons, and three people have died.) But the Scottish parliament does not have power to do so, and the Labour government in Westminster has refused to legislate on their behalf, thus thwarting the wishes of the democratically elected government of the Scottish nation.
By presenting a progressive and comprehensive policy at complete variance with the thinking from the Westminster government, Plaid Cymru are asserting the need to devolve greater powers to the Cardiff Assembly. Indeed, the devolution of these powers is widely seen as attractive to allow policy to be nuanced towards the specific needs of Welsh communities. All four Welsh Chief Constables called in January 2008 for the devolution of the police, probation, prosecution and court services to Wales. The One Wales agreement between Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Labour Party states that the coalition government ‘will also consider the potential for devolution of some or all of the criminal justice system’.
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