Right wing political parties live and die less on the basis of specific policy outcomes than on their ability to cultivate a general image as the ‘sensible’ option, the ‘common sense’ option and the ‘hard but fair’ option. The most recent changes to policing and prisons policy announced last month by the British government, which would loosen the limits on stop and search, increase incarceration rates and extend sentences, are the latest in the long line of policy missteps made in order to fit with this preferred narrative and justify unbelievable cruelty to voters just as when they’re about to go to the ballot box. The commitments made by the government show with relative clarity that the twin objectives of expanding police powers and increasing incarceration rates will likely be central to future policy changes.
It is easy to dismiss those who argue against ‘tougher’ justice policy as wishy washy, out of touch liberals, failing to acknowledge the real danger posed by crime to ordinary people because they never have to experience it themselves. So let’s acknowledge that over the last past decade years, violent crime in major cities throughout the UK has risen substantially, with London’s murder rate overtaking New York’s in February 2018, a severe abnormality given New York’s murder rate has always been far higher. The number of knife-based offences recorded in London went above 40,000 last year, a 7 year high, whilst the homicide rate across the country as a whole was the highest it has been for a decade.
The government’s proposed solutions rest on one interpretation of this problem – that crime is on the rise because a significant reduction in the use of stop and search, along with early releases and a general softening in the justice system at large, means criminals believe they’re more likely to get away with committing violent crimes.
Now, we should clarify first that the stop and search policies currently in place are just as effective at catching criminals as the old, broader powers. The myth of the old, tougher system being more effective is indeed just a myth. But more importantly perhaps the old powers were far, far less precise than the more restricted but better targeted powers currently in place which prevent police from stopping and searching without due cause. In London, for example, 9% of stop and searches resulted in an arrest in 2010 compared with 33% in 2018.
If increasing stop and search won’t help us catch criminals, perhaps increasing sentencing will scare them into behaving properly. Let’s interrogate the logic that underlies this idea. I believe it goes as follows; criminal behavior is the result of choices made rationally, that is by weighing up the pros and cons of committing a crime. Therefore, by increasing the potential downside to committing a crime, you will dissuade some people from doing so, and so crime will go down.
This argument is severely flawed. Everyone committing these crimes knows that going to prison, likely for years, is a potential consequence either way. The question is whether increasing the sentences and reducing the opportunity for prisoners to be paroled actually affects the decisions they make.
Even if we ignore crimes of passion or impulse, where the potential length of my sentence matters not at all, this reasoning is faulty. If I am planning on committing a crime, fear of prison does not go up in proportion to the potential length of my sentence. This is in part because I often wouldn’t know in advance what my sentence is likely to be. But more importantly, it is a misunderstanding of criminal psychology to assert that, because I am afraid of ten years in prison I am twice as afraid of twenty years in prison. In either case, the prospect of spending so long somewhere so horrible is terrifying and the motivation to stay out of prison does not significantly change when either way I am spending a large chunk of my life behind bars.
The fact that people commit violent crimes at all tells us that for some imprisonment is not a sufficient deterrent, not that a longer sentence is needed to deter them instead.
Prison as a deterrence is filtered through the lens of scarcity and poverty for some people in a way governments of all parties and ideologies fail to grasp. A decade in prison, two decades in prison – these are all abstract and unimportant if violent crime has been normalized as the main source of wealth and respect within your community.
The chances that any given individual joins a gang are always going to be higher if they grow up in poverty and the opportunities to escape it are simply not available to them. We shouldn’t shy away from the simple, difficult truth that the British government has failed these young people over the past decade and that has driven crime up.
Neglect of or cuts to social services, to benefits, to parts of the NHS, to mental health services – these are the root causes of crime in Britain because they are the levers by which the state alleviates suffering for the worst off, and creates opportunities for young people growing up in poverty. The problem for the government is that admitting this would mean admitting that nine years of Conservative government has been an act of immense national self-harm on the part of the electorate.
Above and beyond the damage done by cuts, the social fabric urban Britain has been corroded by rises prices and exorbitant rents driving a wedge within traditional working class communities. The mass exodus from formerly working class areas was only possible because successive governments fell asleep at the wheel and stopped investing in a sizable, properly looked after stock of social housing.
We are reaping the whirlwind of these failures, as communities that used to provide a serious buffer to violent crime simply by offering alternative forms of identification and allegiance, and so a sense of belonging, have disappeared. For one thing, the closure of youth clubs and libraries denies people a shared, public space. Growing up without any real awareness of your community or a sense that the people you live with are anything other than strangers. When that is combined with a crippling lack of opportunity, crime will always worsen. Tinkering with the justice system rather than engaging in the more challenging work of rebuilding the social fabric of working class communities is a waste of time.
Let’s say these changes did work, and crime went down. Even then, I don’t believe the overall cost of these measures would be worthwhile. Widening stop and search powers means we are risking the same kind of breakdown community-police relations we’ve already witnessed unfolding across the Atlantic.
There is no denying that people of colour are far more likely to be targeted by the police’s when they are granted stop and search powers which don’t require some sort of justification, well beyond the relative likelihood that they have actually doing anything wrong. How long will it be before an overzealous officer, accidentally or otherwise, commits a serious act of violence against a young person of colour using these expanded powers? And most importantly of all, why on earth would you ever call or co-operate with the police again once this becomes the new normal? Increasing stop and search powers means every interaction between the police and people of colour becomes more fractious and more dangerous. I put it to anyone who supports these powers that decreasing violent crime should not be at the expense of minorities, and that any solution which puts vulnerable communities at risk is not viable.
The consequences of increased incarceration rates and longer sentences are more worrying still. Johnson has pledged to make prisons safer and improve rehabilitation as well as increasing sentences. These commitments seem fairly disingenuous, not least because being seen as sympathetic to prisoners is only politically important when introducing punitive legislation, as much as a way of assuaging our collective guilt about the way we treat those we incarcerate as anything else. As soon as the government’s spending comes under scrutiny or some other viable excuse emerges, prisoner protections are an easy measure to get rid of.
But to deal with the core policy of increasing sentences, it’s worth acknowledging some people are released before they should be. Equally, some people are kept in prison for longer than they should be. The problem isn’t that sentences in general are too low or too high, but rather that the available mechanisms for evaluating sentences and parole are not fit for purpose and require reform.
More broadly, I think we should be far more skeptical about imprisonment’s role as a key part of our justice system. It’s easy to forget just how severe a punishment it is. Besides the physical dangers, from addiction to violence, prison is emotionally traumatic in a way most people likely won’t ever understand. I don’t know what it’s like to be taken away from everyone I know and love for years of my life. I don’t know what it’s like to have every hour of my day scheduled in for me ahead of time on my behalf. But the damage it does even once prisoners have been paroled is pretty obvious. Rates of addiction are high, rates of severe mental health issues is high and rates of re-offense are high.
Why do the same ineffective policies make their way into government agendas over and over again? Simply, because justice policy is one area that breaks the democratic incentive to implement effective policies because most people don’t intuitively side with the most effective measures. What is intuitive to most people is that we should be harsh in order to reduce crime. And whilst this intuition would probably exist in any case, it is certainly exacerbated by the way in which the media has sensationalized and fixated on violent crime in London in order to back up the government’s narrative of a formerly sensible justice system gone soft.
When people are scared, they act irrationally and support policies they would otherwise reject as unnecessarily cruel. Right wing political parties have been relying on this fear to win elections for a long time, and clearly this new government will be no different. The fact is, fear gets people out of the house and into the polling booth. As long as that remains true, we should all be despondent about justice policy for the foreseeable future.