[A-List] Mind-Forged Manacles

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Crime is down, convictions are down, but the prisons are bursting. Why?

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (June 24 2008)


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 sixty per cent chance of
ending up in jail {11}. I feel I need to say that again: sixty per cent
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 two per cent, while the most serious violent offences fell by
nine per cent {12}. Nor does it reflect the conviction rate. That fell
by four per cent 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 nine per cent 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.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. King's College, London, 2008. World Prison Brief.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poptotal

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-economic-inequality.html

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/467/467we17.htm

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.html

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,
pages 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-economic-inequality.html

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

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