crime | ukwatch.net

Society is Indeed Broken

Ellie Keen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:42:29 +0000

...and we all know who broke it

When submerged under a veritable deluge of ideologically-driven ‘reforms’, it takes something especially imbecilic to provoke a double-take. Louise Casey, the mouthy former head of the Government’s ‘Respect task force’, is set to spearhead the latest New Labour gimmick on law ’n order. Among the 20 proposals that fade from the merely banal to the truly asinine here are three that provoke a modicum of analysis.

Anonymous evidence

Elderly and disabled crime victims – as well as people at risk of reprisals— should be allowed to give evidence in court from behind screens. Ministers are sympathetic to the idea, which already happens routinely in cases involving sex offences and gangs.

Fine, in one way, except that ‘anonymous evidence’ does not allow the defence to cross-examine witnessess or indeed raise questions as to any previous relationship the accused might have had with the accuser that might have lead them to offer evidence (not to mention the possibility of witnesses being coerced as a result of a police vendetta) against the accused in the first place.

Internet crime maps

Online maps with crimes plotted on them to be published every month so people can see how dangerous their area is and how well the police are doing. Gordon Brown has backed the move in principle, but areas could be stigmatised if the maps are street-by-street.

The truth is many working class areas are already operationally stigmatised. ‘Control and contain’, whereby crime in one area is ignored by the police the better to protect a ‘nicer’ middle class area nearby, is commonplace. Online maps would merely give what is custom and practice an air of routine formality.

Youth clubs

Friday-night youth clubs to be set up in 50 of the most deprived areas.

Youth clubs for the the 50 most deprived areas? There are a number of delirious aspects involved in the proposition. Ever notice how New Labour ministers and the media are happy to talk blithely about ‘deprived communities’ without any mention to how they came to be ‘deprived’ in the first place? In the absence of any such analysis it takes a remarkable level of political remove to imagine that thirty years of the deliberate stripping out of the grassroots infrastructure in working class neighbourhoods can be remedied by organising ‘a youth club on Friday nights’. What about the other nights? Or ‘deprived area’ number 51? Or indeed 151?

The media who should be asking the serious questions don’t do so. The Independent’s response, for example, was almost unbelievable. ‘Funding for youth services is already being boosted with poorer communities targeted. But should high-crime areas be rewarded?’ it asks. It is true that poorer communties are indeed being targeted and not in the benign way The Independent likes to pretend. But more than that, as even government statistics demonstrate, it is self-evidently working class people in the high crime areas that are most likely to be the victims of crime. Why punish the community further? But as far as The Independent is concerned—Why not?

Former Tory leader Ian Duncan-Smith blathers on about ‘a broken society’ in a similar way. But rival parties never ever challenge him on who broke it. That is because the beginnings of a solution are staring them all in the face. But why bother going to the root of the problem (the callous and systematic destruction of a youth club infrastructure and the selling-off of school playing fields, and so on) when under existing neo-liberal orthodoxy the unthinking dribblings in the Casey formula work just as well?

Mind-Forged Manacles

Tim Holmes — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:58:05 +0000

Which of these countries has the most prisoners per head of population? Sudan, Syria, China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe or England and Wales? We win, or rather lose: I have ranked these countries in reverse order(1). On this measure, England and Wales have a more punitive judicial system than most of the world’s dictatorships.

On Friday, the government released new figures for the prison population(2). It broke all records, yet again. It has risen by 38% since Labour came to power(3), and now stands at 83,181. What does the government intend to do about it? Lock more people up. It is building enough new cells to jail 96,000 people by 2014(4). At the beginning of this month it laid out its plans for Titan prisons: vast broiler units, which will each house 2,500 people(5). But they’ll be only just big enough: the government expects the number of cons to rise to 95,600 in six years(6).

As ever, Britain appears to be chasing the United States. In both absolute and relative terms, the USA’s prison population is the highest on earth: one percent of its adult population is behind bars(7). This is five times our preposterous rate and six times Turkey’s(8). It is over twice the rate of the nearest contender, South Africa(9). If you count the people under community supervision or on probation, the total rises to over 7 million, or 3.1% of the adult population(10). Black men who failed to complete high school in the US have a 60% chance of ending up in jail(11). I feel I need to say that again: 60% of unqualified black men go to prison. It’s beginning to look as if the state has stopped imprisoning individuals and started locking up a social class. Is this what we aspire to?

To judge by the remonstrations of the tabloids, the answer is yes. But why? And why, in the United Kingdom, is imprisonment still rising? It’s not because of rising crime. Last year crimes recorded by the police fell by 2%, while the most serious violent offences fell by 9%(12). Nor does it reflect the conviction rate. That fell by 4% in 2006 (we don’t yet have last year’s figures)(13). Stranger still, it is not connected to the rate of imprisonment either, which fell by 9% between 2004 and 2006(14).

The prison population is rising for one reason: people are being put away for longer(15). Between 1997 and 2004, the average sentence rose from 15.7 months to 16.1(16). That tells only half the story: the actual time served rose as well, as a result of new laws the government introduced in 1998 and 2003(17). In 2004 the courts started handing down indeterminate sentences – prison terms without fixed limits. These will be partly responsible for the projected growth in imprisonment over the next six years(18).

This exposes a remarkable contradiction in government policy. At the beginning of last year, the criminal justice ministers sent a begging letter to the courts asking them not to bang so many people up, as the prisons were bursting(19). But they are bursting because of the mandatory life terms, indeterminate sentences and other stern measures it has forced the judges to pass. In 2002, England and Wales had more lifers (5268) than the whole of the rest of the EU put together (5046) (20). I can’t find a more recent comparison, and since the accession of the former communist states this is bound to have changed. But it gives you a rough idea of how weird this country is.

So why, when the number of crimes, especially serious violent crimes, is falling, are both the government and the courts imposing longer sentences? Why does the UK consistently rank in the top two places for imprisonment in western Europe? Why, as this country becomes more peacable, does it become more punitive? I don’t know. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. But one thing I’ve noticed is that many of the states with the highest number of convicts are also those with the greatest differential between rich and poor. Within the OECD nations, the US has the second highest rate of inequality. Mexico, which is the most unequal, has the third-highest rate of imprisonment. In the EU, four of the five most unequal nations also rank among the top five jailers(21). The correlation, though by no means exact, seems to apply across many of the rich countries.

This doesn’t demonstrate a causal relationship. But there are three likely connections. The first is that inequality causes crime. This is what Anatole France referred to, when he claimed to admire “the majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”(22) But, while this has proved true at most times and in most places, crime is falling in England and Wales while inequality is rising. The second possible link is that prison causes inequality. The sociologist Bruce Western has shown that jail in the United States is a huge and hidden cause of deprivation(23). When people are locked up, they can’t acquire the skills and social contacts they need to get on outside. Employers are reluctant to take them on when they’ve been released, and they tend to be hired by the day or to get stuck in the casual economy, which is one of the reasons why so many return to crime. Among whites and Hispanics, wages for ex-cons are severely depressed. Among black people the effect is less marked: the “stigma of imprisonment”, Western suggests, appears to have stuck to the entire black underclass(24).

His ground-breaking research shows that US labour figures, which appeared to prove that the rising tide of the 1990s lifted all boats, were hopelessly skewed. The government’s claim that the boom had enhanced everyone’s job prospects – even those at the bottom of the heap – turns out to be an artefact of rising imprisonment: convicts aren’t counted in household surveys. Western found that while general unemployment fell sharply in the 1990s, when prisoners were included, the rate among unqualified young black men rose to its highest level ever: a gobsmacking 65%(25).

The third possible reason for a link between the two factors is that inequality causes imprisonment. I can’t prove this, and it is hard to see how anyone could do so. But my untested hypothesis runs as follows: the greater the wealth the top echelons accrue, the more ferociously they demand protection from the rest of society. They have more to lose from crime and less to lose from punishment, which is less likely to strike the richer you become. The people who help to generate the public demand for long prison terms (newspaper proprietors and editors) and the people who mete it out (judges and magistrates) are drawn overwhelmingly from the property-owning classes. “Those who have built large fortunes,” Max Hastings, who was once the editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote of his former employer Conrad Black, “seldom lose their nervousness that some ill-wisher will find means to take their money away from them.”(26) Money breeds paranoia, and paranoia keeps people in prison.

References:

1. King’s College, London, 2008. World Prison Brief. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?a…

2. BBC Online, 20th June 2008. Prison population at record high. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7465983.stm

3. National Statistics Office, viewed 23rd June 2008. Prison population: England and Wales.
www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D7361.xls

4. Ministry of Justice, 1st February 2008. Minister opens first prison in government building programme. Press release. http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/newsrelease010208a.htm

5. Ministry of Justice, 5th June 2008. Titan prisons. Consultation Paper CP10/08. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/cp1008.pdf

6. Ministry of Justice, August 2007. Prison Population Projections 2007-2014. England and Wales. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/stats-prison-pop-aug07.pdf

7. Sky News, 29th February 2008. US Prison Population Reaches World High. http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1307500,00.html

8. The US rate per 100,000 people is 751. UK: 152, Turkey: 127. King’s College, ibid.

9. 347 per 100,000.

10. Bruce Western, 22nd June 2007. Mass Imprisonment and Economic Inequality – III. Who we Punish: the Carceral State. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6959890/Mass-imprisonment-and-ec…

11. ibid.

12. Home Office, July 2007. Crime in England and Wales 2006/07. Statistical Bulletin. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb1107.pdf

13. Ministry of Justice, November 2007. Criminal Statistics 2006: England and Wales. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/crim-stats-2006-tag.pdf

14. ibid, Table 1.2.

15. Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid.

16. ibid.

17. The Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid, lists these factors as follows:
“• greater numbers of offenders recalled to prison for breaking the conditions of
their licence, reflecting legislative changes in 1998 and 2003;
• increased use of indeterminate sentences following the introduction of
Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) in April 2005;
• the introduction of Suspended Sentence Orders in April 2005 for which
offenders in breach can be taken into custody; and
• inflation in the time certain types of offender remain in prison (particularly in
recent years) as the use of Home Detention Curfew for the early release of
offenders has diminished and the parole rate has fallen.”

18. The Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid, states that “Much of the underlying growth in the High, Medium and Low scenarios can
therefore be attributed to the use of IPP [Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection] sentences.

19. Ministry of Justice, 23rd January 2007. Statement from the Criminal Justice Ministers to the National Criminal Justice Board:
Managing the Impact of Rapid Growth in the Prison Population.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmconst/467/4…

20. Prison Reform Trust, March 2004. England and Wales, Europe’s lifer capital. http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/subsection.asp?id=352

21. I took the inequality stats (as measured by the Gini Coefficient) from the CIA’s World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172….

22. Anatole France, 1894. The Red Lily.

23. Bruce Western, August 2002. The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality. American Sociological Review. Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 526-546.

24. ibid.

25. Bruce Western, 22nd June 2007. Mass Imprisonment and Economic Inequality – III. Who we Punish: the Carceral State. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6959890/Mass-imprisonment-and-ec…

26. Max Hastings, 2002. Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers. Macmillan, London.

Police powers increased by new London mayor

tim — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:24:18 +0000

The new Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has announced sweeping measures to ramp up police powers. After a series of highly publicised knifings in central London last month, the mayor called for a policy of “zero tolerance” and “immediate operational response.” This announcement neatly dovetailed with the launch of a £3 million public relations campaign funded by the Home Office.

The measures introduced include an extension of the existing “stop and search” procedures, the introduction of metal detectors at Underground tube stations across 10 London boroughs and scanning of suspects with hand-held devices.

“Operation Blunt” was launched barely days after the attacks with 4,277 stop and searches around the capital over two weeks. Young people are being singled out for particular attention under the new initiative, with police taking their pictures even if they are found to be innocent of any crime.

Since the beginning of 2007, 68 people aged under 25 have been killed in London, including 13 teenagers. But the new policing measures have been enforced with little attention to the actual levels of violent crime that have been recorded in recent years. There was in fact a sharp fall in knife crime in 2007 and overall knife crime has fallen by 19 percent since 2004.

The increases in violent crime that have been recorded this year have been amongst the young—from teenagers up to people in their early twenties. But civil rights campaigners in the capital have urged caution instead of this knee-jerk and heavy-handed response to the recent incidents. They have called attention to the fact that historically the use of “stop and search” has discriminated against black minorities and, more recently, Asian and Middle-Eastern ethnic minorities. Government figures suggest black people are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, while Asians are almost twice as likely.

Peter Herbert, a barrister and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, was also critical of the plan.

“It will undoubtedly lead to more stop and search, and more racist stop and searches where people are stopped on the basis of their appearance or ethnicity,” he said. “The MPA was not consulted and it should have been. It is another example of policy being manufactured on the hoof for political expediency.”

The Newham Monitoring Project, a group that works against racial discrimination, police misconduct and on civil rights issues, gave a cautionary statement on the mayor’s response:

“If Boris Johnson wishes to address gun and knife crime, he needs to first carefully examine why current police powers, which are some of the toughest in Europe, are failing to deal with this issue effectively. If the police do not have to apply reasonable suspicion, what grounds will they use to determine who they stop and search? Selecting individuals based on appearance and ethnicity is fundamentally flawed, will criminalise and alienate communities and is ultimately likely to fail like the hated Sus laws that were abolished in the 1980s.”

Under the “Sus” laws police were able to stop and search based on suspicion alone, using the precedent of sections of a Vagrancy Act of 1982, making it illegal to “loiter in a public place” with “intent” to “commit an arrestable offence.”

The police singled out young people in the impoverished areas of the city, stoking tensions between youth—particularly poor black youth—and the police in the early 1980s.

In 1981, police launched “Operation Swamp,” involving stop and searches across large swathes of the poorest working class regions. This was a major factor in provoking the Brixton riots in London, and those in St. Pauls, Bristol and Toxteth, Liverpool.

Under pressure from the public backlash, the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act introduced new rules for stop and search. Officers would now require “reasonable suspicion” that an offence had been committed.

Stop and search powers were again curtailed in 1999, after a public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence found the police guilty of “institutional racism” and negligence in the case.

After the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, the powers were again extended under Section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. Under the previous laws, people stopped for the purpose of a search must have the reason explained to them if they request this from the police. The police are then obligated to explain “reasonable grounds for suspicion”—for example, a recent violent crime in the area or the person stopped matching the description of a suspect.

Under Section 44, the exception to this rule is in cases associated with terrorism, in which case the police have no obligation to give a reason for the stop. In other words, the “clause of exception” gives the police powers to stop, search and detain anyone arbitrarily. Similar powers to detain arbitrarily have been given under Section 60 of the Public Order Act.

The official “Stop and Search” web site produced by the Home Office states that these powers “help to deter terrorist activity by creating a hostile environment for would-be terrorists—ensuring it is not easy for them to carry or use explosives.”

It then explains how this “hostile environment” is created: “Police can search anybody anywhere under this law, and they do not need reasonable suspicion to do so. It is under this law that police conduct random searches in train and tube stations.”

The extremely low efficiency of the stop and search laws in combating street crime is revealed by official statistics: In 2004-05, when 100 people were stopped each day, only 455 arrests were made out of 35,776 searches.

In line with Johnson’s ratcheting up of police powers, the opposition Conservative leader David Cameron called on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to scrap forms officers must fill in when they stop someone. This would effectively enable police to carry out a far greater number of stops with even less accountability for their actions.

Cameron’s call to cut “red tape” reflected views expressed in the Flanagan report, published the following week. Ronnie Flanagan, the chief inspector of constabulary in England and Wales, said police were afraid to use their own judgment because of bureaucracy and form filling.

The Conservatives were competing with Labour in backing Flanagan’s report. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith responded with an official letter of endorsement, urging immediate action to cut down on “needless bureaucracy” and extend police powers to stop and search.

Johnson has also held a highly publicised meeting with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, in early May, announcing a “new partnership” between the two capitals.

Bloomberg has presided over a city that has experienced an unprecedented disparity of earnings between workers and a parasitic financial aristocracy on Wall Street. His administration has made drastic cuts in social services, including health and education, while increasing police powers.

In Britain, over the last decade policing has seen major increases in funding, rising by 39 percent to £5 billion. The overall police workforce has increased by 25 percent in the same period.

Nineteen young suicides in South Wales

tim — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:09:06 +0000

The death of 23-year-old Christopher Jones from Nantymoel on May 5 is the latest in a series of tragic suicides of young people in and around the South Wales town of Bridgend. In the last 12 months, 19 young people under the age of 27, many of them in their teens, have committed suicide in the area. The latest death is the 34th since 2006.

The deaths have generated a media furore, with astonishment and confusion being expressed by the political establishment as to the cause.

Officially, however, an inquest into five of the deaths, held on March 19, said that the deaths were not related.

Allyn Price, a 24-year-old man from Maesteg whose death was investigated at the inquest, was described as “happy go lucky,” with no overt signs of depression. Similar accounts were given of cousins Nathaniel Pritchard, 15, and Kelly Stephenson, 20. A relative told the press, “We just don’t know what is going on in Bridgend. Kelly and Nathaniel were both brilliant kids with good futures ahead of them. We would never have thought in a million years that they were capable of anything like this. None of this makes sense.”

In 2007 Dale Crole, 18, was found hanged in an abandoned warehouse. His friend David Dilling, 19, took police to the scene. Dilling was also found hanged little more than a month later.

It also emerged that Kelly Stephenson knew two other young men who died last year, prompting media speculation of “copycat suicides.” Some of the other suicides were friends, some distant acquaintances; many knew each other through social networking sites. It is reported that seven of the dead are believed to have frequently used the social networking site Bebo, for example. Angelina Fuller, the 14th suicide, had her memorial site posted by her partner on MySpace.

Consequently, the media have blamed such sites for the suicides, claiming that online memorials, which supposedly gave the victims some “prestige,” were triggering the tragedies. With each new suicide inspiring more memorial pages, the louder become the calls for these sites to be controlled and censored.

Madeleine Moon, Labour MP for Bridgend, said, “If you are a young and vulnerable person who sees nothing in life ahead of you, if you are feeling in despair and you can see no way you are ever going to make anything of yourself, having your photograph and your way of dying splashed all over the national media is perhaps one way of gaining fame; a very sad way of getting it but one that certainly some of this coverage is exploring and exploiting.”

The Ministry of Justice, with the departments of Health, Culture, and Children, is currently reviewing laws to censor or shut down sites that give information regarding suicide as an acceptable option. Many users of such sites are not in fact youth, but older people suffering from illnesses for which no palliative care is available.

The police have set up a task force investigating the computers of the youth, as well as the social networking sites.

In fact social networking sites have become hugely popular, particularly among youth, precisely because they offer a limited possibility of expressing both feelings and broader social concerns that have no other outlet—particularly under conditions where young people are deeply alienated from existing forms of political expression.

The calls for censorship of social networking both shift attention from the more fundamental issues giving rise to suicides amongst young people, and prevent discussion at the point when it is vitally necessary to talk to young people about how they feel and what they think. Equally it is not enough to blame media coverage for the suicides, even when it is as shallow and sensationalist as is suggested by lurid headlines about “Death Town” and “Suicide Valley.”

After all, figures from the Office of National Statistics show a death rate from suicides of 19.4 per 100,000 of the population for Welsh men, and 6.3 per 100,000 for women. This is the highest in Britain, which overall has a disturbing rate of 17.4 per 100,000 men, and 5.3 per 100,000 women. Most of these tragic cases never make the pages of the media and the victims do not regularly use social networking sites.

In any case, what is necessary is to ask just why it might be, if Madeleine Moon’s suggestion is true, that some young people are so vulnerable, and see “nothing in life” ahead of them and no way of ever “making anything of themselves,” that suicide could be seen as a way of “gaining fame.” And even if one rejects such a claim, the issue remains of why some young people are so filled with despair.

As a letter to the Times from a writer in Pontypool in South Wales pointed out, would young people stop being depressed if the sites were censored?

The writer went on to call for an examination of the reasons for “such a depressive state of mind,” and suggested it had more to do with “the fact that they are priced out of higher education, have little or no chance of affording a house of their own. And that their only option is to work in a poorly paid job simply to continue their existence … Even when things were bleak in the 70s and 80s, young people had a voice, and often protested passionately against their circumstances. Sadly, those in authority seem to have silenced today’s youngsters, and here we see the logical reaction.”

The fact that the cluster of suicides centres on the former industrial town of Bridgend underscores the necessity to probe these questions more fully. Tens of thousands in the area were employed in mining, or in the steel industry in nearby Port Talbot. Today this has all but disappeared. The major employers now are call centres.

The betrayal of the miners strike of 1984-85 by the trade unions and the Labour Party began the devastation of the area. The closure of pits led not just to a loss of jobs and declining wages, but the break-up of entire communities.

Accompanying this, vast amounts of wealth have been transferred from the poor to the very rich, who have demanded ever greater attacks on the social conditions of working people by the very party that once claimed to represent labour against capital.

For most young people, good job prospects are a thing of the past, and buying a house is impossible. And in the areas of health, social work and mental health, that would once have identified and helped treat those in most need financially and emotionally, cut after cut has been made based on the claim that overcrowded, understaffed and under-funded schools can provide an adequate “joined-up” substitute—using the services of unqualified support staff.

The government’s own official education body, OFSTED, describes 10 percent of state schools as “inadequate.” Class sizes are among the highest in Europe. Meanwhile there are diminishing welfare facilities, long waiting list for counsellors, social workers with dozens of “clients” and a system in breakdown.

The victims of this onslaught on social provision are in turn vilified, demonised and criminalised. Today young people are often regarded as a problem, not as society’s greatest asset and its future. Figures on British youth crime, drunkenness, pregnancy and violence are at their highest and dominate the press. Time magazine led a recent issue with the cover story, “Unhappy, Unloved and out of Control: An epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young.” Britain has the highest population of children behind bars in Europe, with almost 3,000 children now in custody, an 8 percent rise since 2005, compared to Germany with 1,422 and France with 646.

This situation must inevitably produce a deep social malaise that affects significant layers of young people. But it also creates opposing sentiments: a sense of anger, a critical attitude to the existing social set-up and an often profound desire for change. This response is far more widespread than is ever acknowledged by the media. Those within the establishment who have plunged Britain’s youth into such dire straits have no answer to the social despair this generates and are bitterly hostile to and threatened by the inevitable growth of a more forward looking and universalist desire for a better society.

Taking Crime Seriously

eddie — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:32:27 +0000

Introduction

Socialists need to take crime seriously. Traditionally, the left has been regarded as being ‘soft’ on crime, which is a consequence of two main factors. Firstly, it is in part due to the success of the right in determining the crime agenda, but it is also because crime is seldom discussed by socialists in a way that is pragmatic. In this article, I want to make the case that crime is an issue that the left needs to address, particularly if left wing political parties are to make inroads in terms of broad public appeal. New Labour has presided over a mixed economy of criminal justice, which has included the traditional method of incarceration (which has increased under Labour to alarming levels), alongside a range of policies around the theme of crime prevention, which are the main focus of this article.

Why Crime is an Issue for the Left

In the past two decades, crime control has moved from being a peripheral issue to one that is centre stage both in terms of public debate and social policy. Hardly a day goes by without newspapers, particularly the tabloids, discussing crime. The mainstream political parties compete with one another to be ‘tough on crime’. Amongst the general public there is a real sense that crime and disorder is an issue, particularly in regards to young people. Statements like ‘young people have no respect nowadays for their elders or their communities’ have become truisms in some working class circles. The Labour Party acknowledges these sentiments and responds accordingly. Legislation such as the Crime and Disorder Act, or policies on Anti-Social Behaviour is often aimed at Labour’s heartland vote, particularly the elderly in marginalised housing estates; it goes without saying that this group should also be a natural constituent of the left. During the debate on anti-social behaviour, Labour ministers lined up to explain why this bill reflected the concerns of their constituents and in a sense, for once they were actually telling the truth.

Moral Panics

The whipping up of crime and fear by politicians and the media has created what sociologists refer to as a ‘moral panic’. How then does the radical left respond? Traditionally, the response has been to stay quiet or to discuss crime in a way that is abstract and fatalist. For the left, crime is a product of the capitalist system; therefore it is only when capitalism is replaced by something better that you can begin to think about living in a society free of crime. The consequence of this line of thinking is a fatalism which leads to a paralysis amongst sections of the left whenever crime is discussed. Whilst I consider it to be a truism that unequal societies will produce crime, I also believe that the left, if it is to have broad appeal, needs to formulate workable policies in the here and now and respond to the concerns of many working class people who identify crime as an issue. To say we have to wait until there is a revolution, whatever that means nowadays, is to shirk away from responsibility. Moreover, the left needs to engage in a debate about crime control at the level of policy and on the ground practice. Failure to get involved, particularly in marginalised housing estates, creates a vacuum which will be filled by the ideas of the right and in particular the British National Party.

Putting Crime into Context

There is a debate regarding the extent to which crime is an issue. It is often pointed out by the left, and I believe it to be true, that the fear of crime is disproportionate to the reality. Politicians and the media promote the politics of ‘fear’ on a regular basis and it would be surprising if it was bereft of any effect. The ‘rule by fear’ reflects a broader malaise which has infected the body politic. Politicians and governments have detected that they no longer rule on the basis of consensus and popular support. In the past, politicians, in theory at least, used to claim that they represented the public; today the aim of mainstream politicians is not to represent but to protect. What is occurring is a careful marketisation and production of a political discourse based on fear. The world conjured up by opinion formers is that of danger and unpredictability; it is a world which is inhabited by ‘teenage gangs’, ‘drug dealers’, ‘paedophiles’, ‘foreign invaders’ and ‘Islamic fundamentalists’. In this new ‘risk society’ the part played by politicians and government is that of protector. Consequently, the government’s war on crime is perpetual and never ending.

In the midst of all this panic, much of it manufactured, the left has been right to highlight the ways in which the media and the government exploit crime as a means of social and population control. Moreover, socialists are completely justified to warn against the outcomes of moral panics, which is often the violation by government of civil liberties and human rights. However, to dismiss it all as a ‘moral panic’ that is carefully manufactured by ruling elites would be a mistake. Furthermore, it would ignore the lived realities of many working class people, particularly those in the poorer housing estates where the radical left needs to establish a base.

Class and Crime

Crime is specifically placed and unevenly distributed and in the final analysis determined by social class. Forty per-cent of recorded crime takes place in just ten per cent of areas, the majority of which are poor. More than half of the people who show up in official statistics as victims of crime are repeat victims (Hughes et al, 2002). Consequently, a small proportion of people are experiencing a disproportionate amount of crime. All of the available research highlights that the more impoverished the area where you live, the greater the chances of you being a victim of car theft, assault, mugging, damage to your property, burglary or living next door to a drug dealer.

Crime is a class issue and that is why the left must respond. In practice this means seizing the debate from Labour and the reactionary right. The starting point is to engage with contemporary policies in regards to crime and disorder, particularly those policies which constitute as ‘alternatives to custody’ and ‘diversion from court’ which are sometimes dressed up in the cloak of progressivism and therefore seductive to people who may be left leaning. The two pillars of contemporary policy, which aim to move beyond simply locking people up, are crime prevention and community safety, which I would now like to examine in detail.

Crime Prevention

Crime Prevention (CP) emerged in the UK in the 1980s. Hitherto, crime had been regarded as a peripheral issue and one primarily for the police and the criminal justice system. As the Tories economic agenda was pushed to the extreme there was a corresponding rise in the overall crime rate. By the mid-1980s, mainstream criminologists and officials in the Home Office acknowledged, albeit in private, that the war on crime was being lost. Consensus was emerging in right wing circles that the overall crime rate would not be affected by deterrence through punishment or as a consequence of traditional policing and increased police resources. Moreover, from the point of view of the government, treatment programmes for offenders were costly and unproductive. The Tories found themselves with a contradiction; on the one hand they were committed to a ‘prison works’ ethos, but at the same time they recognised that whilst prison was politically necessary, it was also highly expensive for a government committed to reducing public expenditure. It was in the context of reducing treasury expenditure in the criminal justice system that prevention began to look extremely attractive. Crime prevention was identified by the Home Office as being a policy which in the long term would be ‘cost effective’.

Situational Crime Prevention

In the 1980s, discourses on crime shifted from overall cure to one of managing crime control. Despite the rhetoric of being ‘tough on crime’, which was lapped up by a docile media, what emerged in policy terms was an acceptance of crime as a necessary risk among others in what was referred to as the modern risk society.

Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) measures reflected this new thinking. SCP was seen as a pre-emptive approach that relied not on improving society or its institutions but on reducing the opportunities that exist for crime. SCP has been influenced by behavioural psychology and what theorists call Rational Choice Theory (RCT). RCT posits a common-sense view that crime is committed by rational actors who make psychological judgements or calculations in response to situations. The response to reducing crime is relatively straightforward according to RCT. What you need to do is create an environment where committing crime is difficult or extremely risky. If the criminal knows that he or she is likely to caught, and that the odds are stacked against them, this will decrease the likelihood of them offending. In practice, reducing the opportunities that exist for crime has been divided into two categories, ‘target hardening’ and ‘surveillance’.

‘Target hardening’ means strengthening and making more secure everyday devices such as doors, telephone boxes and cash withdrawal machines at banks. Also included are things such as installing burglar alarms on property and placing steering locks on cars. CCTV is now the main form of ‘surveillance’ in the UK. In fact, British citizens are now the most observed by CCTV than any other population in Europe. Also included under ‘surveillance’ are neighbourhood watch schemes introduced by the Tories in the 1980s.

CP approaches to crime control are viewed by their proponents as offering a way out of the failed traditional sanctions such as imprisonment and rehabilitation. SCP is seen as being able to reduce crime levels without the direct involvement of the criminal justice system. From this perspective, CP is conceived by its proponents as being ‘anti-statist’ and in line with the political philosophy of neo-liberalism. However a social price has been paid and we should ask ourselves if it has been worth paying? We now live in a nation where fear dominates and this has resulted in community segregation and the creation of a fortress mentality towards society. Furthermore, wherever there is fear, there will always be some right wing populist preparing to attack our civil liberties and take more power away from the citizen towards the state.

Community Safety

Community Safety (CS), alongside incarceration and crime prevention is the third pillar of contemporary crime control. Originally introduced by the Tories in the 1980s, albeit sporadically, CS approaches were taken up with zeal when Labour came to power in 1997. Labour controlled local authorities have been enthusiastic to sign up to community safety initiatives, which they like it because it emphasises ‘community’ and ‘grassroots’ approaches to crime. Moreover, local authorities are in the driving seat. Community Safety, according to its adherents chimes with an older aim of Labour and social democracy in general, which is to address the underlying causes of crime. CS is window dressed with buzzwords such as ‘partnership working’, ‘active citizenship’, ‘social inclusion’ and anything which follows the amorphous term ‘community’.

The 1998 Crime and Disorder Act instructed local government to play a leading role in co-ordinating community safety initiatives. CS was introduced at a time when the power and influence of local authorities was waning. It is not that difficult to see why local councillors were keen on CS: they saw it as a means of reinvigorating and giving purpose to local government. In practice local authorities are responsible for establishing various ‘partnerships’ which bring together the public, voluntary and private sectors.

Partnership Working

Labour likes to boast that partnership working is a holistic way of addressing crime control and one which utilises the resources of various stakeholders and actors from differing ends of the crime control spectrum. In addition to this, the government claims that partnership working is reinvigorating democracy at local level. For Labour, the democratic nature of partnership working is evidenced in the ways in which partnerships ‘consult’ with local communities and incorporate the community sector into the partnership model. Despite the gloss of community regeneration and empowerment, the reality of partnership working has been rather different.

Community partnerships need to be seen in the context of the neo-liberal withering away of the social state, whereby services once provided by local authorities, are either contracted out to private tender or are handed over to the chronically under-funded voluntary sector. Partnership working is part and parcel of a culture of managerialism that now exists in the public sector, which in the main demoralises staff and undermines the very ethos of public services. Community Safety Partnerships are littered with terms such as ‘target setting’, ‘crime reduction performance indicators’ and ‘best practice’ guidelines. Labour likes to boast that its response to crime is ‘evidence-led’ and based on ‘what works’. In reality such claims are rather patchy: it is argued by criminologists, that methodologically rigorous research is the exception not the norm (Hughes, et al, 2002). Even the Home Office has acknowledged in numerous reports that monitoring and evaluation are one of the weakest elements of crime prevention programmes. In truth, Labour’s crime control agenda is driven more by ideological factors than practical considerations.

Labour’s modernisation project has introduced a rigorous culture of auditing into the public sector. Auditing, despised by most workers in the public sector, creates a climate that encourages distortion and spin. Auditing creates a mentality whereby community safety initiatives focus on organisational instead of social goals. In practice, this results in organisations producing ‘paper trails’ of achievement and success which bears little relationship to real events taking place in communities (Hughes, et al, 2002).

Community Safety has deliberately de-politicised the issue of crime. Moreover, the appeal to ‘community’ and localised solutions encourages communities to look inwards and removes from the agenda issues such as unemployment and public housing. Noticeable by its absence in the crime debate are traditional social policy concerns such as welfare and re-distribution of wealth. Furthermore, CS has contributed to a culture whereby social policies have become ‘short-termist’ in their thinking. Although there is not the space to discuss it here, the issues raised by crime prevention and community safety highlight bigger concerns about social policy itself which the left needs to address. There is a blurring of the boundaries between traditional social policy and criminal justice. The consequence is that poverty is transferred from the realm of social policy into a matter for penology, criminal law, policing, crime prevention and community safety (Hughes, et al, 2002).

Conclusion

The left must engage with crime at the level of policy and real events as they occur on the ground. This requires two things. Firstly, it means formulating policies in the here and now which can win popular support. It also means engaging in a debate about the ways in which crime has been localised as a consequence of community safety policies. The changes in the electoral system in Scotland (despite the elections debacle) are creating an opportunity for real change to happen at local level. One of the things that could happen is that the localisation of public policy under the term ‘community’ might be introduced to more rigorous scrutiny and public debate. Although it is fashionable for ministers and policy makers to refer to ‘community’ at every given opportunity, the reality on the ground is rather different. Policies such as ‘community safety’ or ‘community planning’ mean very little to real people outside of the apparatuses of bureaucrats and middle managers who are not directly accountable to the communities they serve. An opportunity is emerging for a mammoth spotlight to be shone on public policy in the community. Moreover, there is the potential to introduce a politics which is adversarial and puts back on the agenda traditional social policy concerns such as wealth redistribution and welfare. The radical left, to be credible, needs to be ready to engage in this new milieu. A starting point is to take the issue of crime seriously. This means engaging with crime as an issue not at the level of the abstract, but at the level of public policy.

References

Hughes, G, McLaughlin, E and Muncie, J, (2002), ‘Crime Prevention and Community Safety’, SAGE Publications Ltd, London, UK

Gary Fraser has recently completed a Masters in Social Policy and Criminology and is a member of Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement

Man of Straw

Ellie Keen — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:41:14 +0000

If anything epitomises the vacuous posturing which disfigures modern politics, it is successive governments’ policies on criminal justice – or to give it the tabloid treatment, “law’n‘order.”

Analysis and reason go straight out the window, in favour of “toughness.” This, however, is the brittle toughness of the school bully.

It doesn’t matter how many times the government’s own figures show crime to be falling, it doesn’t matter how many times the people who actually know anything about the issue explain that prison does not prevent crime, as far as both new Labour and the Tories are concerned, there is only one priority – appeasing right-wing media proprietors and their fearful “middle England” constituency.

New Labour has created more than 3,000 new criminal offences since it came to power in 1997 and judges have found themselves increasingly restricted on sentencing.

As a result, Britain’s prisons are currently groaning under the weight of an incredible 81,000 people.

But the capitalist media still screams that Britain’s justice system is “soft” on criminals and prison numbers continue to soar.

Such nonsense informed the misnamed Justice Secretary Jack Straw last December, when he announced that the government would deal with the problem of our groaning jails by, er, building more of them. With predictably headline-chasing machismo, he declared that these PFI-financed monstrosities – to cost at least £1.2 billion – would henceforth be known as “Titan” prisons. Gosh, how impressive.

But even this misconceived policy appeared to be in doubt yesterday. Straw popped up on BBC radio to talk about a damning report from the chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers, who insisted that a building programme should not supersede reoffending schemes, reform of women’s jails, probation and mental health.

“We haven’t got planning permission for these places. We are not definitely going ahead with them,” admitted Mr Straw, just hours before the Prime Minister, with the decisiveness that has marked his tenure, told MPs that they would go ahead – after a “consultation.” This does not inspire confidence in the government’s ability to formulate sensible policy.

“Do we really want to go down the Californian route, where the prison budget is greater than the higher education budget?” asks Howard League director Frances Crook and it is a key question for the future shape of government policy.

Sensible policymakers would listen to Ms Owers, probation officers and reformers like Ms Crook. They would also try to flesh out Tony Blair’s soundbite on being “tough on the causes of crime” – poverty and despair.

But, with all three main parties wedded to the idea of increased private-sector involvement in our public services, the future looks bleak. If it becomes profitable to lock people up, then big business will lobby for even more “tough” sentencing policies and, if this coincides with the neoliberal government’s need for more control over their citizens, then that is what they will be given.

It is vital that socialists and trade unionists campaign for a genuine display of toughness from a Labour government – the sort of toughness that can stand up to the likes of the Daily Mail and its billionaire handlers.

Forget the Stereotypes:

Ellie Keen — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:44:22 +0000

...Teen crime is a plea for help

The figures are rising – 26 teenagers have been murdered in London this year. For me, a 19-year-old female, it causes sadness, anger and unease. I’m not scared of walking out my front door and being gunned down but it does worry me that many teenagers wouldn’t hesitate to do just that, regardless of how minor the motive may be. A momentary look, an accidental shove, a minor disagreement, your postcode.

I spent the first 11 years of my life in Manor House, not too far from where the recent Stoke Newington murders took place – the shooting of 17-year-old Etem Celebi and the stabbing of 16-year-old David Nowak. After moving to another area, I kept in touch with people whom I had met at school and in the area, meeting up whenever I could without my parents catching me out. After all, my parents moved out of Manor House to make sure my younger brother and I grew up in a slightly better area.

By the time I turned 14, I fell into the typical route of teenage rebellion: skipping school, incredibly heated clashes with my parents, anything I shouldn’t really be doing. If my group ever got into a dispute outside of our circle, it was not due to some stereotypical gang mentality of wanting to gain status. It was simply about supporting your friend. Friends are the family you choose. For inner-city teens, it’s about a sense of belonging – something that isn’t present in all family environments.

With my friends I’d experiment with drugs, be present when dealings took place and then go home to my family and get on with whatever coursework I had to complete for school. In many ways it was like leading a double life.

As part of this group I witnessed my friends being beaten up by other teens and vice versa. I wouldn’t frequently start fights, but if someone tried to make me look stupid or inferior to them I would try and counter that. I never witnessed anyone use a knife or gun but I knew that a couple of the boys usually carried some sort of weapon, usually a blade.

During my first year of A-levels, I decided that I’d had enough. Not in some dramatic Hollywood way but because I was lucky enough to realise that what I was becoming increasingly involved in would not end positively. My “us against the world” mentality weakened. I broke off all contact with my former friends after a violent falling-out with a girl whom I had known for about nine years.

Pride is very important to teens. She didn’t understand where I was coming from; her belief that I considered myself better than them justified physical fights and the threat of being raped by her drug-dealing boyfriend. I knew they were serious in their threats but I would never admit or show any fear.

There is more pressure placed on teens today than ever before: family, school, friends, money, looking and acting a certain way. I could go on. There are too many teenagers today who feel they have no option but to fall into a life of gangs or crime. Unfortunately media glorification of such individuals fuels the “get rich or die trying” mentality. Others are driven by fear.

We can’t tackle this ever-increasing problem by alienating teenagers. What we need is a voice to bridge the differences that divide us from our elders. Teen crime is almost always a plea for help.

Possibly the scariest thing is that knives and guns are no longer being carried for protection but in order to feel significant and gain repute. Yet these youths are a minority. We’re not all gang members from rough backgrounds with attitude problems. The majority of us want to do well in life. It’s just a shame so many of us are getting lost along the way.

Missing the Point

Ellie Keen — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:39:01 +0000

Another day, another shooting in urban Britain. South London residents like myself woke yesterday to find chaos on Streatham High Road. Like a scene from a movie, two men – both black – had been gunned down in a drive-by shooting on Europe’s longest high street, in the early hours and close to the ice rink where 16-year-old James Andre Smartt-Ford was murdered earlier this year.

The usual stream of buses were brought to a sudden halt and diverted. Cue long-faced bus drivers and annoyed passengers. The increasing speed with which the shock subsides after each passing firearms incident and people’s attention turns to transport disruption and the matter of how to get to work, is symptomatic of how frequent such occurrences seem to be becoming in our inner cities. Sadly, people are getting used to it.

That the victims were not in their teens but in their 30s is of little comfort. One of the two men died from his injuries shortly after; the other lived to fight another day. The Metropolitan Police’s Operation Trident squad, which targets gun crime in the black community, was dispatched to investigate and several arrests have been made.

This latest gun battle comes shortly before Keith Jarrett, the current president of the National Black Police Association, gives a keynote speech to his organisation’s annual conference tomorrow. He will call for the number of stop-and-searches of young people in particular to be increased, to reduce the number of shootings. His speech has been heavily trailed in advance and if Sgt Jarrett wanted a storm, he has got the row he wanted.

Jarrett is no fool, nor is he a man to be dismissed lightly. His position at the NBPA is an elected and not an honorary position – he is no stooge. This serving officer of over 14 years’ standing had this to say to the Observer over the weekend:

“From the return that I am getting from a lot of black people, they want to stop these killings, these knife crimes, and if it means their sons and daughters are going to be inconvenienced by being stopped by the police, so be it. I’m hoping we go down that road. I am going to be pressing [Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair] to increase stop-and-search. It’s not going to go down very well with my audience, many of whom are going to be black.”

To say his comments will not be well received is a gross understatement. Michael Eboda, editor of New Nation, one of Britain’s two leading black newspapers with a readership of over 60,000, puts it thus: the NBPA President has well and truly “put his foot in it”.

Well-intentioned Jarrett may be, but where is the evidence to support his staggering claims? Are we really to believe that the “return” (whatever that means) from the black community to which he refers shows a desire for the increased exercise of these kinds of powers, the over-zealous use of which triggered major riots in the 1980s in London and beyond? Has the angry generation that rioted way back then, suddenly come to its senses and realised that it was wrong all along?

What about the NBPA itself? Has it commissioned a survey into this matter to find out what our ethnic minority communities think about Jarrett’s proposal? Does the NBPA even identify with its president’s views? We are not told. And are the letters bags and radio phone-in programmes of Britain’s ethnic media overflowing with readers and listeners asking for their children to be stopped and searched? If Eboda’s comments are anything to go by, this would certainly not appear to be the case.

Jarrett says he is not arguing for the disproportionate use of stop and search and he is against racial profiling. Pressed on BBC Radio 4’s World this Weekend programme he said “I’m talking about young people right across the board”. Why, then, do his comments seem to be principally aimed at his own community? It may not have been his intention, but it certainly is the impression which is left. Even if his comments are directed at all young people, black people are six times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police in any event.

Parliament’s home affairs select committee noted in their recent report on this topic that in some London boroughs with relatively small black populations, young black people are far more likely to be stopped and searched – in Kingston-upon-Thames they are 14.4 times more likely to be stopped. Just how much more stop and search does Jarrett think young black people should be subject to (let alone tolerate)? Maybe he will expand on this tomorrow.

The trouble is Jarrett has gone on the rampage on this issue like the proverbial bull in a china shop. It is not a very well thought-through intervention. It is not clear that his policy prescription – and there are many problems with it – would even work. The proportion of searches resulting in arrests for all ethnicities under the most commonly used statutory power, to stop and search people carrying prohibited or stolen goods and offensive weapons on the basis of “reasonable suspicion”, is just 11% (it is a measly 3% with the less commonly used power to stop and search without the need for suspicion but in a designated area).

What his proposal will engender is further distrust and resentment on the part of black youngsters who come from a community that has never fully trusted the police – one need not mention all the shocking deaths of black men in police custody over the years to demonstrate there is still a problem. The select committee report was unequivocal: there is a clear perception among young people and those working with them that police officers may generalise and stop and search black people based on negative stereotypes. What black community leaders are crying out for is sensible, professional and courteous community policing based on real intelligence, not an indiscriminate, poor quality, often rude approach that alienates and breeds discontent, which is the danger with Jarrett’s proposal.

As ever, there is an elephant in the room which Jarrett and politicians who focus on sanction and yet more legislation ignore at their peril – deprivation. It is not an excuse but it provides some explanation for what we find happening on our streets. Gun crime disproportionately impacts on black people – they make up just 2% of the population in England and Wales but one-third of gun and homicide victims and suspects; 80% of black people live in areas ridden with poverty. Other victims of all ethnicities, like Rhys Jones in Croxteth, Liverpool are being gunned down in poor areas. So the real answer to this phenomenon perhaps lies in tackling the continuing inequalities in our society – and that is an altogether more complex policy challenge.

Chuka Umunna is editor of the online political magazine, TMP.