Creating Freedom. Raoul Martinez

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СКАЧАТЬ that serves as an antidote to feelings of shame and humiliation.)

      The most horrific individual acts of violence are almost always symptoms of extreme forms of abuse and neglect. In the US, ten times as many people with serious mental illnesses – such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia – are in prison than in a state hospital.⁵¹ In effect, illness has been criminalised. Having spent over thirty years at the UK criminal bar, and ‘rather a lot of time in prisons’, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC speaks from experience when she writes:

      For most people, prison is the end of a road paved with deprivation, disadvantage, abuse, discrimination and multiple social problems. Empty lives produce crime . . . The same issues arise repeatedly: appalling family circumstances, histories of neglect, abuse and sexual exploitation, poor health, mental disorders, lack of support, inadequate housing or homelessness, poverty and debt, and little expectation of change . . . It is my idea of hell.⁵²

      In our society, children subjected to the harshest, most impoverished environments are increasingly being criminalised. Kennedy remarks that ‘Ninety per cent of young people in prison have mental health or substance abuse problems. Nearly a quarter have literacy and numeracy skills below those of an average seven-year-old and a significant number have suffered physical and sexual abuse.’⁵³

      Economic, political and cultural arrangements shape identities, opportunities and, ultimately, behaviour. Harsh punishments aimed at those who have already been brutalised and undermined by these forces only pile injustice upon injustice. If society is not doing what it can to address the root causes of crime – at all levels of the system – the supposedly pragmatic justifications for severe punishment lose all credibility. What right do we have to condemn crime if we do not also condemn the conditions that breed it?

      Ultimately, all that separates the criminal and non-criminal is luck. The skewed distribution of ‘racial luck’ is particularly disturbing. Although black people make up only 12 per cent of the US population, they account for 40 per cent of its prison population. Across the US today, black people are more than six times as likely to be imprisoned than whites, 31 per cent more likely to be pulled over while driving than white drivers, and twice as likely to be killed by a cop (and more likely to be unarmed when killed).⁵⁴ Racial prejudice permeates almost every area of American society, greatly diminishing the opportunities available to black people and ethnic minorities. Fifty years after Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, many of the racial divides in American society persist. A white man with a criminal record is still more likely to be considered for a job than a black man without one.⁵⁵ Analysis of US government data by the Pew Research Center shows that ‘When it comes to household income and household wealth, the gaps between blacks and whites have widened. On measures such as high school completion and life expectancy, they have narrowed. On other measures, including poverty and homeownership rates, the gaps are roughly the same as they were 40 years ago.’⁵⁶

      A similar pattern is to be found among ethnic minorities in the UK, with black people five times more likely to end up in prison.⁵⁷ The Equality and Human Rights Commission found that, when officers did not need suspicion of involvement in a crime to stop and search (under section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994), black people were thirty-seven times more likely to be targeted. In fact, young black men are more likely to end up in prison than at an elite university.⁵⁸ And Inquest, a UK charity that campaigns against deaths in police custody, have found that, since 1990, over 400 people from black communities or ethnic minorities have died while incarcerated or in the custody of the police.⁵⁹

      Imprisoning lawbreakers, once the sole responsibility of the state, is now increasingly run for profit by private business – a trend firmly established in the US and garnering support in the UK. In the US, about 10 per cent of prisoners are locked up in privately run institutions. A study from the University of Wisconsin in 2015 found that states with private prisons have higher rates of reoffending and that private prisons are keeping inmates locked up for longer.⁶⁰ Given that more prisoners serving longer sentences means more profit, this is a predictable outcome. Today, this $5 billion industry is doing what all big industries do: using a portion of its earnings to lobby governments to rescind regulations and pass laws that will allow them to generate even greater profits. In the case of the prison industry, this means lobbying the government to put more people behind bars. A report from the US National Institute on Money in State Politics shows that, for the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, prison companies donated $3.3 million to political parties. From 2006 to 2008, the nation’s largest prison corporation spent $2.7 million on lobbying for stricter laws.⁶¹ The profitability of prisoners does not end there. Inmates’ work in private prisons is increasingly contracted out to major corporations for abysmally low wages. In public prisons the wage can be in the region of the minimum wage, but in private prisons it can be as low as 17 cents an hour, or 50 cents in the more generous institutions. Those who refuse to work can be locked up in isolation cells.⁶² These practices are beginning to resemble a form of slave labour.

      Although the evidence suggests that you cannot be ‘tough on crime’ without being ‘tough on inequality’, a shift from the welfare state to the security state has taken place over the last half century. In the UK and US, ‘tough on crime, tough on welfare’ rhetoric has long been embraced by the major parties. The result has been rapidly rising prison populations and widening social inequality. In the UK, each place in prison costs £75,000 to build and a further £37,000 a year to run (an expense greater than the annual cost of studying at Eton, the elite British school).⁶³ The annual cost of incarceration in the US is about $63 billion.⁶⁴ Criminal justice expenditure in some US states outstrips funding for public education. Over the past couple of decades, California has built roughly one new prison a year, at a cost of $100 million each.⁶⁵ Over the same period, it has built only one new public college. Across the US, spending on prisons has risen six times faster than on higher education.⁶⁶ Observing the immense costs of an expanding criminal justice system, philosopher Douglas Husak asks: ‘Is there no better use for the enormous resources we expend on criminalization and punishment? Money and manpower are diverted from more urgent needs [to] enforce laws that our best theory of criminalization would not justify.’⁶⁷

      The vast resources we expend on locking people up could be used to reduce inequality, thereby improving people’s lives and eliminating many of the conditions that breed crime. Yet, for decades, politicians have rejected this framing of the problem. President Ronald Reagan asserted: ‘we are told that the answer to . . . [crime] is to reduce our poverty. This isn’t the answer . . . Government’s function is to protect society from the criminal, not the other way around.’⁶⁸ Former British Prime Minister John Major warned in 1993 that ‘Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less’.⁶⁹

      The data show that higher rates of material inequality, within and between nations, strongly correlate with larger prison populations. The more unequal a society is, the higher the percentage of people in jail.⁷⁰ And people lower down the social hierarchy, with less income and less education, are far more likely to end up in prison.⁷¹ The most unequal societies – led by the US and Singapore with the UK and Israel not too far behind – have, by a wide margin, the largest proportion of their populations behind bars. The most equal countries – Japan, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark – imprison a much lower proportion of their populations. The differences are not small. In the US there are 576 people in prison per 100,000, fourteen times higher than Japan, which has a rate of forty prisoners per 100,000.⁷² When US states are compared, the pattern holds, with more unequal states tending to have larger prison populations.

      The differences in crime rates can only account for a small part of the variation in the numbers imprisoned across the range of countries. It tends to be ideology that determines how often imprisonment is favoured over non-custodial sentences and how harsh sentencing will be. The UK regularly leads the rest of Western Europe in rates of imprisonment. Since 1990, the number СКАЧАТЬ