Criminal Justice Matters - 2011march - Canadian Harm ...

cjmThe
Magazine of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
Issue 83
March 2011
Criminal Justice Matters
Myths and criminal justice
Plus
Work in prisons
Spying on communities
Violence and surveillance
rCJM No 83.indd 1 25/02/2011 07:43:01

EC DO INT TO ER NI AT SL
EDITORIAL
The labours of Sisyphus?
Will McMahon and Tammy McGloughlin introduce this issue of
cjm. 1
TOPICAL ISSUES AND COMMENT
Violence and surveillance in mental health wards 4
Suki Desai considers the negative impact on vulnerable people.
Protecting endangered species 6
Jasper Humphreys and M L R Smith discuss how laws are being
undermined in areas of conflict.
Immigration detention in Northern Ireland 8
Robin Wilson reports on the lack of due process for asylum
seekers.
A lesson in how not to spy on your community? 10
Imran Awan discusses how the balance between security and
intrusion has undermined community relations.
THEMED SECTION: MYTHS AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE
The hall of mirrors: criminal justice myths uncovered 12
Rebecca Roberts considers the distortions and myths described
in the themed section of cjm.
New Labour’s crime statistics: a case of ‘flat earth news’ 14
Tim Hope examines the distortions behind the crime statistics.
Crime: myth or reality? 18
Richard Garside considers definitions of crime in the myth
making process.
Truth and lies about ‘race’ and ‘crime’ 20
Will McMahon and Rebecca Roberts consider ethnicity, harm
and crime.
Justice is a way of being, not a moment in court 22
Charlotte Weinberg discusses the myth of justice in an unequal
society.
Are drugs to blame? 24
Alex Stevens considers the evidence on drug-related crime.
‘Saints and scroungers’: constructing the poverty and crime
myth 26
Lynn Hancock and Gerry Mooney question the supposed links
between poverty, immorality and crime.
Understanding the demonised generation 28
Brian McIntosh and Annabelle Phillips challenge the view that
young people are responsible for society’s ills.
Contents
cjm No 83 March 2011
Policing myths 32
Megan O’Neill explores the myth that bobbies on the beat cut
crime.
The ‘alternative to custody’ myth 34
Helen Mills questions claims that community sentences cut
prison numbers.
DEBATING... SHOULD PRISONERS WORK?
Should prisoners work from 9-5? 37
Joe Black, Mark Day, Steve Gillan and Gemma Lousley offer
their views on plans to implement a 40-hour working week
with minimum wages for prisoners.
REVIEW
Reflections on international youth justice: 40
a personal view
Rod Morgan is shocked by the imagery at a recent youth justice
conference.
For advertising email:
tammy.mcgloughlin@crimeandjustice.org.uk
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rCJM No 83.indd 2 25/02/2011 07:43:01

This year the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is
celebrating its 80 th anniversary (see page 3). Throughout
these 80 years there have been a number of recurring
myths about ‘crime’ and criminal justice that the Centre
has sought to challenge. So it is appropriate that the
contributors to this issue’s themed section, edited by
Rebecca Roberts, systematically tackle a number of
the most enduring myths about criminal justice. The
debunking of one myth may be achieved by appealing
to another, so it is only when reading the articles as
one piece that the true scale of the myth-busting that is
required becomes clear.
In the topical section, surveillance technology is
considered. Is it the efficient harm prevention measure
we have been led to believe? Articles by Suki Desai and
Imran Awan focus on how cameras have been introduced
with the rationale of having beneficial effects, but with
the practical implementation revealing adverse
consequences. Desai describes how the use of
surveillance within mental health hospitals, introduced as
a measure to reduce violent attacks on staff in practice,
‘has the potential for undermining the intimacy and
therapeutic relationship between ward staff and patients.’
and explains that, to date, there has been no full
evaluation of their efficacy.
Meanwhile, Awan considers the use of surveillance in
the predominantly Muslim areas of the West Midlands.
He argues that the police targeted specific areas using
tactics that ‘are both heavy handed and counterproductive’
and suggests that the deployment of CCTV,
ostensibly introduced to tackle ‘anti-social behaviour’,
has, in fact, marginalised the neighbourhood by using the
cameras as a means to ‘spy’ on residents. He concludes
that in order to mitigate against the damage caused to the
community, the police will now have to attempt to
rebuild trust by admitting their mistakes.
The targeting of particular groups is also addressed by
Robin Wilson, who reports on the lack of due process for
asylum seekers. He cites their experiences of being held
in police custody over time and without automatic access
to legal assistance. Wilson highlights the arbitrariness and
humiliations of being treated as ‘criminal or even
terrorist’ where customary norms of the law are not
applied.
A subject often on the periphery of the law, the
protection of endangered species, is described by Jasper
Humphreys and M L R Smith; they discuss how, in spite
of international legal conventions and protocols, wildlife
and biodiversity are severely threatened. Trading in, for
example, ivory and rhino horn, provide low-risk
cjm no. 83 March 2011 ©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies 1
10.1080/09627251.2010.536435
The labours of Sisyphus?
Will McMahon and Tammy McGloughlin
introduce this issue of cjm.
profiteering for poachers and the consequent falling
numbers of already endangered species. While there
appears to be no impetus to enforce legislation,
conservationists have engaged public awareness and
support in an effort to protect species from extinction.
Our debating section considers the proposal, put
forward by the Justice Minister Ken Clarke, for a 9 to 5
minimum wage work routine for those in prison. This has
sparked a widespread debate, with some regarding the
proposal as a viable route for the incarcerated getting a
dose of the ‘work ethic’, while others have a much more
critical view. Part of this exchange takes place in this
issue’s debating section, with contributions from Joe
Black representing the Campaign Against Prison Slavery
who sees the idea as ‘a vision of a neo-Victorian
rehabilitation regime’, while Mark Day from the Prison
Reform Trust argues that the plan is ‘in principle,
absolutely right.’
From a trade union perspective, Steve Gillan, General
Secretary of the Prison Officers Association, suggests that
if we are to get prison numbers down then getting to
grips with the problems those in prison face should be
our first concern. He also believes that the idea of private
companies laying off workers outside the walls, to
employ cheap labour inside, is a moral problem.
Meanwhile Gemma Lousley, of the Criminal Justice
Alliance, asks a crucial question: ‘If prisons remain
overcrowded, how will there be enough staff to supervise
prisoners working a 40-hour week?’.
Finally, in a short but potent article, Professor Rod
Morgan offers his personal reflections on a recent
conference on youth justice he attended in Italy, and
describes the impact, on him and others, of images
presented at the conference. The first, a montage of film
clips drawn from a drug centre and youths in custody in
Chile, left many in the conference stunned; the second, a
series of photographs from a Texas boot camp that reveal
‘embedd[ed] hate in Good Ole Texas’.
This last article reminds us that attempting to radically
change criminal justice can appear a Sisyphean task.
After 80 years there is still much to do. Is it true, as
Camus wrote in in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus
‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill
a man’s heart.’? However you answer the question
yourself, we hope you can support us in our efforts by
making a contribution to our anniversary appeal. n
Will McMahon is Policy Director and Tammy McGloughlin is Project
Support Officer at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
rCJM No 83.indd 1 25/02/2011 07:43:01
E D I T O R I A L

E D I T ON RE IWA SL
2
News from the Centre for
Crime and Justice Studies
Annual Event
On January 20, the Centre held its Annual Event:
Utopia or Dystopia? Living in hope not fear.
Professor Vincenzo Ruggiero, Baroness Vivien
Stern, Professor Rod Morgan and Professor David
Nutt each vividly expressed their hopes and fears
for the future. The event was well attended and the
audience responded with comments and questions
for the panel. An enjoyable evening was had by all!
HOME SWEET HOME
Announcement: the Centre has
teamed up with the Open University
We are pleased to announce that the Centre has become a formal partner of
the International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) which is
based in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. ICCCR is a unique
multi disciplinary and cross faculty initiative drawing on expertise from Social
Sciences and Health and Social Care; and from the affiliated International Centre
for the History of crime, policing and justice, based in the Faculty of Arts. For more
details about the ICCCR and the friends that we will be collaborating with please
visit: www.open.ac.uk/icccr
LIKE US? THEN SUPPORT US!
You can support our work by signing up for our free monthly e-bulletin, attending
our events, using our publications, and all importantly – telling us what you think!
If you want to take it one step further, then please consider joining the Centre as
a member. From £25 per year you can receive Criminal Justice Matters as well as
receiving access to additional resources and benefits. While we enjoy your moral
support, a bit financial help never goes amiss!
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has relocated to new
offices at 2 Langley Lane, London, SW8 1GB.
www.crimeandjustice.org.uk
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
Photographs courtesy of Melinda Kerrison and Ed Brenton
rCJM No 83.indd 2 25/02/2011 07:43:03

Help us to inspire enduring change -
80 th Anniversary Appeal
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is celebrating its eightieth anniversary
year in 2011. Throughout our history we have had a track record of policy
independence and research integrity. Our commitment to the evidence base
means that we do not endorse ‘flavour of the month’ policy solutions. Our
commitment to independence means that we do not attempt to take the ‘inside
track’ with the government of the day. Instead, we seek to focus on fact rather
than myth, with the aim of inspiring enduring change.
In 1931, the world was living through a major financial crisis. Eighty years
on we face equally uncertain times that will be challenging and will need
independent and critical thinking; the Centre stands ready to meet this
challenge while maintaining its tradition of honesty and working in the public
interest. To do this, independent sources of funding are crucial; so we are
asking all those who support our mission and values to help us by making a
donation to our 80th Anniversary Appeal.
You can make a donation by visiting our website:
www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/80thanniversaryappeal.html
rCJM No 83.indd 3 25/02/2011 07:43:04

T O p I C A L I S S u E S A N D C O m m E N T
4
Violence and
surveillance in mental
health wards
Suki Desai considers the negative impact
on vulnerable people.
It is estimated that there are now
over four million closed circuit
television (CCTV) cameras in Britain
watching our every move. The
increased use of CCTV monitoring
and surveillance within public
areas has received much research
attention, and there is now a critical
body of surveillance literature on
the implications of such watching
within urban and street settings.
Despite the announcement of
the new coalition government to
limit the use of CCTV and better
regulation of CCTV in public
spaces, CCTV cameras have become
an established tool as a crime
prevention and security measure.
They are now widely adopted by
both public authorities, such as local
authorities and police, as well as
private citizens in the prevention of
crime. This is despite the fact that
the Home Office’s own research
suggests that CCTV cameras are
an ‘ineffective tool if the aim is to
reduce overall crime rates and make
people feel safer’ (Gill and Spriggs,
2005).
Public concern and research has
tended to focus largely on the use of
CCTV surveillance within urban
spaces and little attention has been
paid to the use of this new
surveillance technology and its
effects inside organisations. CCTV
cameras are now to be found inside
schools, children’s nurseries and
playgroups, care homes, probation
hostels and mental health hospitals.
CCTV cameras have crept into these
organisations with surprisingly little
challenge. In these spaces the
cameras are not deployed to watch
‘strangers’, although this may be one
of its imperatives; they are primarily
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550146
deployed to watch people or
children who are known and need to
be watched for their own protection
and safety. The altruistic perception
of the cameras carrying out an
important function renders them
benign instruments; after all who
would not want their child to
be safe whilst at nursery or in
school?
CCTV intrusion?
CCTV cameras have featured as a
surveillance tool inside mental health
hospital wards since 2002. Their
initial use appears to be sanctioned
by the Department of Health as part
of their zero tolerance campaign in
order to reduce
the number of
violent attacks
on staff working
within NHS
learning disability
and mental health
hospitals. It is
difficult to state
exactly how
many hospitals
actually use CCTV
surveillance
in ward
environments as
there is no one body that maintains
such information. A preliminary
survey undertaken in July 2008
(cited in Desai, 2009) suggests that
there were about 34 NHS Mental
Health Trusts using CCTV in patient
accessed areas during this time.
This amounts to 157 wards in 85
hospitals. The cameras were located
in patient bedrooms, seclusion
rooms, patient accessed toilets,
patient lounge areas, patient dining
rooms, education rooms, activity
rooms and viewing rooms. The
Dissent and avoidance
of cameras as a way of
resisting surveillance
can be interpreted as
signs of illness within
mental health settings.
types of mental health hospitals
using CCTV included hospitals that
provide secure environments, acute
inpatient units, specialist eating
disorder units, units that care for
children and young adolescents
with mental health problems, and
learning disability and psychiatric
intensive care units. This information
does not include all NHS trusts
and also does not include private/
independent hospitals; hence the
actual use of CCTV within ward
environments is likely to be higher.
Suspicious behaviour
The intended purpose of the cameras
is to provide a safe environment
for staff, patients and any visitors,
and whilst this purpose may appear
straightforward, in their actual
use they present a number of
complications. The use of CCTV
cameras within hospital wards is not
based on reciprocity and patients
do not have a choice as to whether
they are monitored or not. Dissent
and avoidance of cameras as a way
of resisting surveillance can be
interpreted as signs of illness within
mental health settings. Indeed it has
the added disadvantage for making
a patients’
behaviour look
more suspicious,
especially if the
watching is out
of context and
undertaken by
staff who do not
know a patient
very well, such
as security
guards. The fact
that patients
within mental
health hospital
wards operate at varying levels
of perception and cognition also
influences how they react to cameras
and for some patients the existence
of cameras is likely to incite a
violent response, especially if their
mental health problems are linked
to feelings of paranoia. It is these
aspects that make gaining informed
consent from patients for the use of
cameras problematic.
The issue of violent attacks on
staff by patients is a serious one. The
National Audit results (Healthcare
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Commission and the Royal College
of Psychiatry, 2005) suggest that in
the period 2004-2005 alone there
were approximately 43,000 assaults
reported by staff working in learning
disability and mental health
hospitals. Violence is not precipitated
one-way and whilst violence to
patients has not been given much
prominence within mental health
research, the fact that cameras can
also capture violence from staff to
patients cannot be underestimated.
The deaths of Esmin Green and
Wang Xiuying both posted on
YouTube, whilst not saving these
women’s lives, allows for some level
of justice for the relatives affected by
their death. Claims have been made
by patients of serious crimes, such as
rape, within mental health wards and
it is clear that these hospital wards
remain unsafe places for both staff
and patients. Whether CCTV
surveillance is the solution to the
violence is questionable.
Impact of cameras
The effectiveness of CCTV
monitoring in reducing violence
in hospital wards has yet to be
evaluated fully. Apart from some
localised studies (see for example
Warr et al., 2005) there is very little
research that assesses the impact of
the cameras on patients and
nursing practices. CCTV’s potential
to control and regulate human
behaviour has been a central feature
of surveillance studies. Orwellian
accounts highlight such surveillance
practices through the maintenance
of hierarchical social control, whilst
Foucauldian analysis draws on
Bentham’s model of the panoptican
to identify disciplinary aspect of
surveillance in the production of
what Foucault (1977) refers to as
‘docile bodies’.
However, these explanations do
not easily sit within mental health
ward settings. For example, the
maintenance of social control within
wards does not simply apply to
patients; frontline staff are also being
watched and this has the potential to
change their interaction with
patients, affecting nursing practices,
not necessarily in a positive way.
Similarly, for patients who are
acutely unwell the panoptic
practices of the cameras will not
affect their behaviour. These patients
are more likely to be violent, and
positive nursing practices are
affected. Staff can feel that they do
not need specific knowledge and
information; for example, what might
trigger a patient’s violence behaviour,
because the cameras provide this
safety measure. Here it is not just the
investment of relationship between
staff and patients that has the
potential to be affected, the diligence
required for certain nursing practices,
such as undertaking comprehensive
and regular patient assessments, also
has the potential to be influenced
negatively. For some patients,
whether they have the capacity to
understand or not, the cameras may
not be perceived as a safety measure
but as punitive, and, together with
other practices on mental health
wards, such as the use of seclusion,
this is also likely to have a negative
influence on their behaviour.
Recovery in mental health
hospitals is based very much on
positive interaction and contact
between staff and patients. CCTV has
the potential for undermining the
intimacy and therapeutic relationship
between ward staff and patients and
in a reduction of face-to-face
contact, resulting in what Lyon
(2001) refers to as ‘disappearing
bodies’. The disembodiment of
patients, created by observing them
through a two-dimensional reality,
coupled with the lack of contact and
social interaction between patients
and staff, has the potential for failing
to see patient behaviour within
context, resulting in the failure to see
the ward environment as a lived in
space.
Benefits and limitations
It is difficult to assess the benefits
and limitations of CCTV surveillance
within ward settings without
extensive research that includes
the views of patients and staff.
An impact study of the cameras
cannot be measured in isolation
and needs to be assessed together
with other surveillance practices
on the ward, such as one-to-one or
close observations of patients. It is
probable that the implementation
of CCTV cameras has not received
significant debate within mental
health services as they are not
perceived to be a ‘therapeutic’ tool
and like patient observations are
seen as way of managing patient
behaviours within wards. However,
the management of insanity is part
of a ‘therapeutic’ process; this is
very evident in the history and rise
of psychiatry as the sole arbitrator in
controlling madness.
Finally, the issue around violence
within mental health hospitals has
been around ever since the
introduction of asylums and hospital
care. The debate around minimising
violence within hospitals needs to
include the voices of both staff and
patients. Currently, expedient
responses based on new public
management have created the
potential for further segregation
between staff and the patients that
they have a caring responsibility
towards. n
Suki Desai is Senior Lecturer at the University
of Gloucestershire. She has previously worked
as regional director with the Mental Health Act
Commission.
References
Desai, S. (2009), ‘The new stars of CCTV:
what is the purpose of monitoring
patients in communal areas of psychiatric
hospital wards, bedrooms and seclusion
rooms?’, Diversity in Health and Care, 6,
pp. 45-53.
Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and
Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gill, M. and Spriggs, A. (2005), Assessing
the Impact of CCTV, Home Office
Research Study 292: Home Office
Research, Development and Statistics
Directorate.
Healthcare Commission and The Royal
College of Psychiatry (2005), National
Audit of Violence 2003-2005, Healthcare
Commission.
Lyon, D. (2001), Surveillance and
Society: Monitoring Everyday Life,
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Warr, J., Page, M. and Crossen-White, H.
(2005), The Appropriate Use of Closed
Circuit Television (CCTV) in Secure Unit,
Bournemouth: Bournemouth University.
cjm no. 83 March 2011 5
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T O p I C A L I S S u E S A N D C O m m E N T

T O p I C A L I S S u E S A N D C O m m E N T
6
Protecting endangered
species
Jasper Humphreys and M L R Smith discuss
how laws are being undermined in areas of
conflict.
After drugs and guns it is the
illegal trade in wildlife, whether
dead or alive, that generates
the biggest global share of illicit
sales, amounting to $10 billion a
year. However, it has the weakest
enforcement apparatus by a long
way of the ‘big three’ sectors. How
is this so?
While there is a huge raft of
conventions, protocols and
agreements to halt the destruction
of biodiversity and its wildlife, the
underpinning legal mechanism is
essentially powered only by high
hopes and expectations. This is ‘soft
power’ and, from a conservationist
perspective, this lack of enforcement
means that wildlife is wide open to
exploitation and the lack of viable
protection is a death-trap for many
endangered species.
Putting aside environmental
issues such as climate change and
habitat destruction, the conservation
of biodiversity and wildlife is bound
up with some of the thorniest
international legal issues that relate,
on the one hand, to sovereignty,
statehood and security arrangements
while on the other hand are
dominated by the economic forces of
globalisation. What often joins the
two sides is war; as the great Prussian
philosopher of war, Carl von
Clausewitz, famously wrote: ‘war is
an extension of politics by other
means’.
Since the end of the Second
World War there have been an
estimated 160 wars. It is calculated
that during the 1990s there were
three times as many ongoing wars
than any time in the 1950s and twice
as many during the 1960s. The point
here is that the Earth’s areas of richest
biodiversity lie mostly in tropical and
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550147
sub-tropical regions of developing
states, many of which have been
affected by conflict at some time or
another. A report by a group of
leading US scientists showed that 80
per cent of the armed conflicts
between 1950 and 2000 took place
in ‘hotspots’, areas deemed to
contain particularly diverse ranges of
threatened species (Hanson et al.,
2009). Even more explicitly, the
incidence of resource-based wars
has been growing steadily; one
United Nations report (2010)
suggests that of the 35 conflicts since
2000, 18 have been about or fuelled
by the exploitation and control of
natural resources, as opposed to wars
Rhinos at risk
fought over issues of ideology and
territorial security. Such wars are less
about clashes of inter-state interests
and more about civil wars within
states, and are particularly prevalent
in Africa.
Even though the process defies
the conventional notion of politics as
some sort of ideological struggle it is
still deeply political and invariably
results in the emergence of a quasistate
apparatus, the influence of
which is often restricted to urban
concentrations, is dominated by
criminal plunder, with limited
jurisdiction over its subjects, and
where the supply of welfare and
social services to the population are
© Melinda Kerrison
all but non-existent. These are
different kinds of wars, and a
different kind of politics drives them.
The participants in resource wars
pursue their political agenda through
violence in order to increase their
power by whatever means necessary
at the expense of time-consuming
state building, using force with
enhanced terror if necessary but
which form new rules and authority.
In other words, ‘the state’ merely
becomes a conduit for booty for
these elite groups. For example, the
Madagascan government of former
disc jockey Andry Rajoelina has
been accused of encouraging the
‘timber mafia’ so that it can reap a
percentage of export tax on
hardwood sales, a policy that has
had disastrous effects on the sensitive
habitats that support the native lemur
population (Smith, 2009).
The predominant intrastate
character of war, involving political
factions and ethnic groups, has
resulted in mass migrations of
refugees. Refugees share a common
need with the military forces that
oppress them, which is to survive off
the land, with devastating effects on
wildlife and wider eco-systems.
During Rwanda’s civil war nearly 50
per cent of the country’s seven
million people were displaced into
camps along the eastern regions of
the Congo. Of these, approximately
860,000 refugees settled around the
Virunga National Park, home of the
Mountain Gorilla, with another
330,000 camped in the Kahuzi Biega
National Park, the only home of the
Grauer’s Gorilla.
Worldwide awareness about
protecting wildlife has moved a long
way since the first conservation
treaty was signed in 1889 to regulate
salmon fishing on the Rhine. One
side of the attempt to arrest the
assault on wildlife resides with ‘soft’
power diplomacy and the threat of
sanctions. The cornerstone of this
approach is the Convention on
International Trade and Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora
(CITES). Established in 1973 and now
with 175 signatories, CITES aims ‘to
ensure that international trade in
specimens of wild animals and
plants does not threaten their
survival’. While CITES has attempted
rCJM No 83.indd 6 25/02/2011 07:43:05

to construct an international
consensus its weakness is that it
relies solely on the goodwill and
co-operation among signatories and
lacks the means of enforcing
compliance in the face of mounting
and complex threats to animals,
which either did not exist or were
unknown when CITES was originally
established.
The ineffectiveness of
international conventions is
underlined by the fact that while
international law has been applied to
environmental disputes, such as the
Trail Smelter Case between Canada
and the United States in 1938, no
action has been taken against any
actor for wilful environmental
destruction (United Nations, 2006).
With ivory trading at over £1000
per kilo and a rhino horn fetching
£150,000, the illegal wildlife trade
presents high-reward/low-risk
opportunities for poachers, especially
given exceptionally weak
enforcement regimes. Since 1979,
the African elephant population has
fallen from an estimated 1.3 million
to under 400,000 with the decline
most dramatic in the past few years;
for instance, the elephant population
in the Zakouma National Park in
Chad dropped from 4000 in 2006 to
just 600 at the beginning of 2010
(Leake, 2010). Elsewhere, the
number of tigers in India reported
across 23 game reserves registered a
drop from 3,700 in 2002 to 1,400 in
2010; furthermore, it is estimated
that in the wild some 4,200 black
rhinos are left in Africa, along with
only 370 Nepalese rhinos and a
mere 130 surviving Javan rhinos
(Milliken et al., 2009).
With the growing influence of
China in the developing world
comes a heightened scramble for
resources along with different
cultural attitudes to the natural
world. The Chinese policy of offering
soft loans has enabled it to discreetly
‘invade’ the continent, extracting raw
materials on a vast scale to fuel its
burgeoning economy. China’s
involvement in the process of
resource exploitation brings with it
an enticement for local people to
poach and trade wildlife. The
decision by CITES in 2008 to a
limited trade in ivory in response to
Chinese pressure has been blamed
for an increase in poaching in East
and Southern Africa (Eccleston,
2008).
The alternative to ‘soft’ power is
‘hard’ power, being the use or threat
of physical coercion but examples
relating to biodiversity and wildlife
protection are rare and usually spring
from ancillary reasons such as the
need to protect species for the sake
of tourism.
Thus, it is left to the more radical
end of the conservation spectrum to
take up the forceful struggle to
protect animal life such as the
marine conservation group, Sea
Shepherd, whose high-end passive
aggressive confrontations with
Japanese whalers, gains large
audiences via the Whale Wars series
on Animal Planet TV.
Sea Shepherd illustrates an
evolving, and intriguing,
development in international affairs,
which is the capacity for selfgenerating
resistance beyond the
state in support of transnational
laws and norms. Public support for
direct action stems in part, as Sea
Shepherd’s leader Paul Watson
emphasises, because his
organisation’s actions are directed
against illegal whaling and are
aimed at enforcing international
maritime law under the United
Nations World Charter for Nature,
adopted in 1982.
Wildlife forms part of the natural
resource base of the state as codified
in the UN Resolution on Permanent
Sovereignty over Natural Resources
in 1963. The principle of permanent
sovereignty, as enshrined in the
founding United Nations Charter, is
regarded as a basic right of selfdetermination
and provides for
exclusive control of the resources
within state boundaries. However,
the issue of sovereignty becomes
much more fraught in resource rich
areas as wildlife parks and reserves
are themselves often located in areas
containing oil, coltan or diamonds,
as well as timber products.
Though environmental and
conservation issues were not covered
in the original Charter, the General
Assembly and the United Nations
Environmental Programme (UNEP)
has developed a range of important
environmental declarations and
treaties over the last four decades.
The 1992 Rio Declaration
announced that ‘peace, development
and environmental protection are
interdependent and indivisible’. The
then British Prime Minister, John
Major, speaking as president of the
Security Council, declared that
‘non-military sources of instability in
the economic, social, humanitarian
and ecological fields have become
threats to peace and security’.
The quickening decline in
biodiversity and wildlife is forcing
conservationists to think in radical
directions but their task is not being
helped by international law: some
argue that the law itself is as much
the problem as the issues and thus
the world has become upside down,
rather like Alice in Wonderland. n
Jasper Humphreys is Director of External
Affairs of the Marjan Centre for the Study of
Conflict and Conservation, Department of War
Studies, King’s College, University of London.
M L R Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory
in the Department of War Studies, King’s
College, University of London. He is Academic
Director of the Marjan Centre for the Study of
Conflict and Conservation.
References
Eccleston, P. (2008), ‘China allowed to
buy ivory from Africa’, Daily Telegraph,
15 July.
Hanson, T., Brooks, T., Fonseca, G.,
Hoffmann, M., Lamoreux, J., Machlis, G.,
Mittermeir, C., Mittermeir, R. and Pilgrim,
J. (2009), ‘Warfare in biodiversity
hotspots’, Conservation Biology, 23(3),
pp. 578-587.
Leake, J. (2010), ‘SAS veterans to join
new war on poachers’, The Sunday
Times, 21 March.
Milliken, T., Emslie, R.H., Talukdar, B.
(2009), ‘African and Asian Rhinoceroses
– Status, Conservation, and Trade’.
CoP15. CITES Secretariat, Geneva,
Switzerland.
Smith, D. (2009), ‘Madagascar lemurs in
danger from political turmoil and “timber
mafia”’, The Guardian, 19 November.
United Nations (2006), ‘Reports of
International Arbitral Awards’, Trail
smelter case, United States, Canada, 16
April 1938 and 11 March 1941, Vol 11,
pp. 1905-1982.
United Nations (2010), Disasters and
conflicts, United Nations Environment
Programme, www.unep.org/
conflictsanddisasters (accessed
5 November 2010).
cjm no. 83 March 2011 7
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T O p I C A L I S S u E S A N D C O m m E N T
8
Immigration detention
in Northern Ireland
Robin Wilson reports on the lack of due
process for asylum seekers.
Equality before the law is a
fundamental legal principle. In the
context of globalisation, it becomes
even more so: in a world of moving
people, individuals who are not
citizens of the state in which they
find themselves – women trafficked
in the sex trade, for example – may
otherwise fall into a legal black
hole. Yet, when it comes to those
seeking asylum in the UK, a system
of shadow law has developed in
recent years, to which normal rules
of natural justice do not apply.
This legal erosion has followed from
the ascendancy of a political and
official discourse which has elided
policy on immigration and asylum
– even though one is discretionary
(outside of the EU context) while the
other is founded on mandatory state
obligations – and is administratively
embodied in the establishment of
the UK Borders Agency (UKBA) to
‘control’ both. Alongside this has
been the routine prefacing in the
popular media of the word ‘asylumseeker’
with the adjective ‘bogus’.
Together, these have had a
dehumanising effect. Rather than the
individual refugee evoking a reaction
of empathy and hospitality from the
public, a disposition of official
suspicion and mistrust has been
projected on to this stigmatised
‘other’.
Sepia image
Its most extreme manifestation is the
UKBA’s estate of 11 ‘immigration
removal centres’, its size unparalleled
in Europe. Here, asylum-seekers
who have sought refuge in the UK
– often based on a sepia image of
the country as a beacon of human
rights – may find themselves subject
to indefinite administrative detention
with no automatic judicial oversight,
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550148
as the Commissioner for Human
Rights of the Council of Europe,
Thomas Hammerberg, complained in
a memo (Commissioner for Human
Rights, 2008) following a visit to the
centres.
Hammerberg
Mr Hammerberg called on the UK
authorities to consider ‘drastically
limiting’ resort
to detention and
he ‘strongly’
recommended
a time limit, as
in France and
elsewhere. His
memo urged onsite,
expert legal
advice, so that
bail might easily
be sought, and
said detention
of children
should cease. In
July 2010, the
Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg,
announced that the family wing of
Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire was to
close.
These concerns were echoed in a
report from the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission. This
stressed that detention should be a
last resort, subject to judicial
oversight and a time limit. It called
on the UK government to ‘challenge
myths, stereotypes and xenophobic
sentiments articulated in the media
and by others around immigration
and asylum, by consistently stating
the benefits of migration and its
duties in relation to people seeking
asylum’ (Latif and Martynowicz,
2009).
Human stories
In June 2010, a report was launched
at Stormont in Belfast which told
Feeling one is being
labelled, and perceived,
as a criminal or even
terrorist – particularly
if one has a non-white
skin colour – is a deeply
hurtful stigma.
eight human stories of individuals
who had arrived in that part of the
UK – from various African countries
and Iraq, Turkey and Bangladesh
– but had found themselves in
detention, mostly at the Dungavel
centre in Scotland (Refugee Action
Group, 2010). The report, which I
had been commissioned to research,
opened a window on a world not
only obscured from the public gaze
but also largely privatised: Dungavel,
like seven of the other removal
centres, is run by a private company,
which also manages transport to and
from it.
Many aspects of these narratives
are deeply disturbing. First, there is
the sheer arbitrariness of the process.
Individual asylum-seekers who have
been complying with requirements
to report weekly to the police have
found themselves
suddenly
detained by
immigration
officers when
they report or
when large
numbers of Police
Service of
Northern Ireland
and UKBA
personnel come
to their home in a
dawn raid. Others
who have been
travelling across
the Irish Sea, in either direction, have
found themselves victims of a kind of
internal immigration control, linked
to a little-known arrangement known
as Operation Gull.
Humiliation
Second, there is the
disproportionality involved. A
particular humiliation visited upon
a number of the individuals in
this report was being handcuffed
as they were led on to, and off,
the ferry to Scotland, in front of
other passengers. Feeling one is
being labelled, and perceived,
as a criminal or even terrorist –
particularly if one has a non-white
skin colour – is a deeply hurtful
stigma.
Third, there is the lack of
accountability and due process.
Again, these narratives tell of being
rCJM No 83.indd 8 25/02/2011 07:43:05

Case study: Jamiu
Jamiu was a Nigerian citizen studying in London, who visited
Belfast for the christening of a friend’s baby girl. He said:
‘Instead of spending eight lovely days in Belfast I spent ten
days detained in an airport, a police cell, and a detention
centre for illegal immigrants.’ At Belfast International Airport,
Jamiu was stopped by an immigration officer. He noted that
the only other person taken out of the queue was a black
woman. ‘I was very uncomfortable about this fact as other
people were looking at us.’
Reflecting on the experience which saw him being held in a
detention centre in Scotland prior to his release, Jamiu said:
‘I have never been in any trouble of any kind in my life … No
matter how long I live, this ordeal will be with me for the
rest of my life.’
held in police custody without the
automatic access to a lawyer to
which individuals who have been
suspected of a criminal offence are
rightly entitled.
Finally, there is a general sense of
bewilderment as to what is going on.
Individuals are held for days, weeks
or even months with no idea how
long this process will last. They are
moved from one centre to another at
very short notice. Even release may
come like a bolt from the blue.
The report, which was
commissioned by the Refugee Action
Group, a
network of
relevant NGOs
in Northern
Ireland, surveyed
evidence of good
practice in
Scotland,
Sweden and
Australia before
recommending
what a 2006
paper on
alternatives to
detention for an
all-party
Westminster
group (Bercow et
al., 2006) called ‘a supportive
casework approach’ of ‘communitybased
support and welfare, rather
than punishment’.
Specifically, it recommended:
. . . there is a general
sense of bewilderment
as to what is going on.
Individuals are held for
days, weeks or even
months with no idea
how long this process
will last.
• the Northern Ireland Executive
should follow Scotland in
adopting an ‘integration from day
one’ approach to all newcomers
to the region;
• a small reception unit should
be established to assess the
complex needs of asylumseekers,
particularly in terms of
legal representation, health and
support, accommodating them
while this assessment is made;
and
• a contract should be secured
with a specialist third-sector
organisation
(or consortium)
which would
offer wrap-around
support to asylumseekers,
including
accommodation
in dedicated
housingassociation
property, centred
on an
individual
caseworker
with whom
each asylumseeker
would be
required regularly
to engage until given leave to
remain or removed.
These recommendations, equally
applicable elsewhere, would seek
to rehumanise and individualise
members of a group subjected
to a pejorative collective label.
Barbara Muldoon is a solicitor in
Belfast who has handled many
asylum and immigration cases
and she encapsulated the issue
in these terms: ‘This,’ she said, ‘is
transformative of people’s lives.’ n
Dr Robin Wilson is an experienced policy
analyst who works with public bodies and
non-governmental organisations, with
intellectuals and practitioners.
References
Bercow, J., Lord Dubs and Harris, E.
(2006), Alternatives to Immigration
Detention of Families and Children,
discussion paper for all-party
parliamentary groups on children and
refugees, www.biduk.org/pdf/res_reports/
alternatives_to_detention_july_2006.pdf
(accessed 27 January 2011).
Commissioner for Human Rights (2008),
Memorandum by Thomas Hammerberg,
Commissioner for Human Rights of the
Council of Europe, following his visits to
the United Kingdom on 5-8 February, 31
March and 2 April 2008. https://wcd.coe.
int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=1339037&Site=
CommDH&BackColorInternet=
FEC65B&BackColorIntranet=FEC65B&
BackColorLogged=FFC679 (accessed 27
January 2011).
Latif, N. and Martynowicz, A. (2009),
Our Hidden Borders: The UK Border
Agency’s Powers of Detention, Belfast:
Northern Ireland Human Rights
Commission, www.nihrc.org/dms/data/
NIHRC/attachments/dd/files/109/Our_
Hidden_Borders_immigration_report_
(April_2009).pdf (accessed 27 January
2011).
Refugee Action Group (2010), Distant
Voices, Shaken Lives: Human Stories of
Immigration Detention from Northern
Ireland, www.refugeeactiongroup.com/
download?id=MTg= (accessed 27
January 2011).
cjm no. 83 March 2011 9
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T O p I C A L I S S u E S A N D C O m m E N T
A lesson in how not to
spy on your community?
In Birmingham the impact of
counter-terrorism legislation
and its operation on the Muslim
community has led to a community
that does not trust the police force.
The West Midlands Police force
was so concerned with the terrorist
threat that it decided to install
secret covert and overt cameras.
The thinking surely was that the
police could use these cameras to
spy upon a community and help
prevent another 7/7.
The fact Washwood Heath and
Sparkbrook are predominately
Muslim areas means fundamentally
that the police thought the fight
against Al-Qaeda had now reached
the streets of Birmingham. Yet it
appears the cameras have had a
counter-productive effect, further
fuelling the risk that some members
of the local community may now
turn to extremism with the initiative,
known as Project Champion,
becoming a key part in terrorist
propaganda. Many questions
remain unanswered. For example,
what will be the long-term impact of
this event on the Muslim families?
Will it lead to a community
becoming isolated from wider British
society? Has it had the result of
radicalising those concerned, leading
to extremism within this local
community?
Between September 2001 and
March 2008, there were over 1,500
people arrested under counterterrorism
legislation, a third were
charged but only one in eight people
convicted (Home Office, 2009). This
has led to claims within these
communities that the police tactics
10
Imran Awan discusses how the balance
between security and intrusion has
undermined community relations.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550149
are both heavy handed and counterproductive.
With a number of high profile
police raids in Birmingham since the
creation of counter-terrorist laws,
there is a sentiment of distrust and
resentment. The fear is that this could
pave the way for further extremism
within these communities. For
example, since ‘Operation Gamble’
which involved a series of police
raids in 2007 in the Alum Rock area
of Birmingham, aimed at foiling a
terrorist plot to behead a British
Muslim soldier (Guardian Press
Association, 2008), the local
community feels their reputation has
been tarnished and believe they are
perceived as supporting, condoning
and nurturing terrorism.
Spying on the community?
The previous government had
stated that the strategic key was
‘winning hearts and minds’.
Enlisting the support of these local
communities is crucial in the fight
against extremism. However these
raids, and the subsequent CCTV
surveillance, have caused further
damage as the community has a
deep mistrust of the police and
counter-terrorism legislation.
Photo courtesy of Melinda Kerrison
Although these specific areas
have had a high rate of people
charged with terrorist offences, for
example in Small Heath, Alum Rock,
Sparkbrook and the wider area of the
West Midlands, this can in itself not
justify the disproportionate use of
such surveillance. There was a real
opportunity for West Midlands Police
to engage and promote a mutual
understanding after 7/7 and develop
the West Midlands as a place of
understanding and tolerance.
However, that opportunity was lost
when the police forgot their role as
custodians for justice and instead
became the villains of peace.
There is no single pathway to
extremism; instead there are factors
from socio-ethnic to cultural reasons.
One key factor is ideology enshrined
in political grievances and a
mistaken understanding of Islam.
However, the CCTV cameras
installed in Sparkbrook and
Washwood Heath will mean there is
now a grave fear that some Muslim
youth may turn to extremism
because of anger, alienation and
dissatisfaction from British society.
Under Project Champion
(working with Safer Birmingham
Partnership, Birmingham City
Council and other agencies), the
areas were to be monitored by a
network of 218 cameras, including
72 hidden ones. The cameras were
put up, it was claimed, to tackle all
forms of crime, predominately in
Muslim suburbs in the Washwood
Heath and Sparkbrook area. The
Muslim people in this community
come from a culture where they do
not like to complain, and they do not
have any expectations that things
should be better with policing. This is
precisely why critics argue that West
Midlands Police targeted this
community because of its
vulnerabilities (how wrong they
were!). All this has achieved is to
further alienate a community already
antagonised by the Government’s
‘Prevent’ strategy.’
The covert cameras formed what
is known as a ‘ring of steel’, which
means local residents’ every move
was being tracked. There was no
formal consultation over the scheme,
and local councillors who were
briefed about the cameras said they
rCJM No 83.indd 10 25/02/2011 07:43:07

were deceived into believing they
were to tackle anti-social behaviour.
The cameras in actual fact were paid
for by the Terrorism and Allied
Matters fund, administered by the
Association of Chief Police Officers.
It has long been argued that
CCTV surveillance is an infringement
of privacy and civil liberty, but by the
same token is a key tool in tackling
the fear crime. At the same time
serious questions have been raised
about CCTV’s effectiveness in
preventing serious crime (Gill and
Spriggs, 2005). Moreover, it has been
argued that CCTV could fall foul of
simply targeting a specific
community disproportionately
resulting in a clear breach of privacy
laws (Scarman Centre, 2005).
Project Champion has been
abandoned for now but the cameras
remain – with bags over them – and
have left a dark cloud hanging over
local residents who feel they have
been unfairly targeted. A recent
damning report of the project,
conducted by Sarah Thornton, Chief
Constable of Thames Valley Police,
revealed how members of the police
force operated in what can only be
described as mafia style policing. The
report highlights how there was a
‘storyline’ and a baseless ‘narrative’
in order to conceal the real truth
behind the cameras (Thornton,
2010). The report makes a point in
arguing that police officers had
‘misled’ the local community and
local community leaders on the true
nature of the use of these cameras.
What is even more worrying is that
West Midlands Police failed to
comply with CCTV Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and
the legal regulatory framework
(Thornton, 2010).
It was clear the cameras were
there for much more than fighting
crime or anti-social behaviour, as
was initially suggested, and were
used as a mechanism to spy on the
Muslim community. West Midlands
Police have had to publicly apologise
for getting it ‘badly wrong’ (The
Telegraph, 2010), but the lasting
damage they have caused between
community relations has made
gathering intelligence for the police
even more problematic than ever
before.
With the police force now facing
a possible legal challenge under the
European Convention on Human
Rights, there is a real sense that there
is still more litigation on the way.
Although there is a public review
currently under way, the Chief
Constable of West Midlands Police
has stated his desire to remove the
cameras; however I would argue that
police will continue to use the
cameras in another form, namely for
tackling normal crime.
Amidst the storm of controversy
surrounding the CCTV cameras, West
Midlands Police have further
exacerbated the potential for ethnic
bias against the Muslim community
through the use of gunshot location
technology. The technology, known
as Shot Spotter, is used to prevent
gun-related crime and has been
successful across the United States,
but the pilot scheme (Project Safe
and Sound) now being run in
Birmingham could have wider
reverberations across the city for
community relations. The system has
acoustic sensors that, over an area of
25 miles, can locate gunfire and then
use audio information and video to
capture a suspect or the scene of the
crime. The technology will collect
information and actual recording
clips, which are dispatched to
communication centres and the local
police force.
There is once again a perception
that the police are unfairly targeting
the Muslim community as they did
with the CCTV debacle, leaving
many questions unanswered. For
example, where will the sensors be
deployed? What do they look like?
And more crucially this time, will the
police consult with the Muslim
community about their views? Critics
argue the technology (which costs
over £150,000) is another attempt by
the state to spy on ‘innocent’
communities who may not be
involved in gun-related crime but
caught up by Birmingham’s war zone
image. The problem for West
Midlands Police is managing two
polarising views; on the one hand
the technology is being used to
prevent a serious crime and, on the
other hand, the scheme will
stigmatise a community as the
technology will be deployed in
predominately Muslim areas
(namely, Aston and Handsworth).
Building trust is the only way to
win hearts and minds but the
cameras have only caused more
damage to a fragile relationship.
West Midlands Police now have the
unenviable task of trying to restore
the community’s trust. The police
must now repair some of that
damage caused by engaging with
grass roots, and by visiting local
community members and Mosque’s
(considered places of tolerance and
an agent for the community). The
policing pledge in the West Midlands
is in tatters, and in order for the
police to change that perception it
will mean reaching out to thousands
of people, by admitting mistakes
were made, but also building trust
again as this could provide a key tool
in preventing seeds of extremism and
isolation developing as a result of the
‘spycam’ saga. n
Imran Awan is Senior Lecturer at the Centre
for Police Sciences, University of Glamorgan.
References
Gill, M. and Spriggs, A. (2005), ‘Home
Office Research Study 292’, Assessing
the impact of CCTV, London: Home
Office Research, Development and
Statistics Directorate.
Guardian Press Association (2008),
‘Profile: Perviz Khan’, The Guardian,
www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/18/
uksecurity3 (accessed 22 November
2010).
Home Office (2009), Statistics on
Terrorism, Arrests and Outcomes, 11
September 2001 to 31 March 2008,
http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs09/
hosb0409.pdf.
Scarman Centre (2005), The National
Evaluation of CCTV: Early findings on
Scheme implementation, London: Home
Office.
The Telegraph Press Association (2010),
‘Police apologise for putting 200
CCTV cameras in Muslim area’,
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/
law-and-order/8034999/Policeapologise-for-putting-200-CCTVcameras-in-Muslim-area.html
(accessed
18 October 2010).
Thornton, S. (2010), Project Champion
Review, www.west-midlands.police.uk/
latest-news/docs/Champion_Review_
FINAL_30_09_10.pdf.
cjm no. 83 March 2011 11
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m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
Gazing into the carnival mirror
The 2003 Oxford Dictionary of
English describes a myth as ‘a widely
held but false belief or idea’. The
authors in this issue of cjm challenge
a series of criminal justice myths
including what ‘crime’ is, how much
is out there, who the ‘criminals’ are,
and the claimed neutrality of the
criminal justice system.
Jeffrey Reiman in his book, The
Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get
Prison (2007) eloquently describes
criminal justice as offering a ‘carnival
mirror’ image of reality.
12
The hall of mirrors:
criminal justice myths
uncovered
Rebecca Roberts considers the
distortions and myths described in the
themed section of cjm.
First we are led to believe that the
criminal justice system is
protecting us against the gravest
threats to our well-being when, in
fact, the system is protecting us
against only some threats and not
necessarily the gravest ones ...
The second deception is ... if
people believe the carnival mirror
is a true mirror ... they come to
believe that whatever is the target
of the criminal justice system
must be the greatest threat to
their well-being.
(Reiman, 2007)
In the following articles we
travel down the hall of mirrors
to consider the distortions and
misrepresentations that occur in
popular debates about criminal
justice. The repetition and
propagation of these myths result
in their emergence as ‘common
sense’ thinking. While they may
on occasion be accidental in their
creation, these myths become
significant in justifying biased,
discriminatory and harmful practices
within criminal justice.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2010.525907
Common sense myths
Criminal justice ‘common sense’
offers a set of simplistic yet often
misguided justifications for the
existence and expansion of criminal
justice. A good example is the
recent policy offering by Louise
Casey, Commissioner for Victims
and Witnesses, the common sense
being, according to Casey, that fewer
people should have the right to a
jury trial, which she describes as ‘a
sacred cow’ citing an unreferenced
case from her local paper of a trial
over the theft of tea bags and biscuits
worth £24. When challenged at a
parliamentary hearing Casey argued
‘The evidence base is common
sense, Chairman’ to which the Chair
of the Justice Committee Sir Alan
Beith retorted ‘There is common
sense and there is evidence. They
are not the same thing.’ Casey’s
use of tea bag and biscuit theft in a
policy document was deliberate and
designed for media release and is a
classic myth creator – it will soon be
common sense that too many tea bag
and biscuit trials are reaching the
crown court.
This exchange at the heart of
goverment underscores the
continuing need for critical thinkers
to challenge the myth-laden version
of criminal justice – it is not simply a
polite academic exchange of views
that is taking place – matters of
principle are at stake.
Myth busting
Myth busting in criminal justice is
about unpacking the ways in which
the public are misled in terms of
what and who is harmful in society.
By accepting the claim that the
criminal justice system is based on
impartiality, fairness and equality
attention is thus focused on making it
more fair and more equal at the cost
of failing to draw attention to how as
an institution, these assumptions and
goals are inherently problematic.
Pioneers in the field of myth
busting are Pepinsky and Jesilow,
who in 1984 published The Myths
that Cause Crime highlighting a
series of ten myths:
Myth 1: Crime is increasing
Myth 2: Most crime is
committed by the poor
Myth 3: Some groups are more
law abiding than others
Myth 4: White collar crime is
nonviolent
Myth 5: Regulatory agencies
prevent white-collar
crime
Myth 6: Rich and poor are equal
before the law
Myth 7: Drug addiction causes
crime
Myth 8: Community corrections
is a viable alternative
Myth 9: The punishment can fit
the crime
Myth 10: Law makes people
behave
(Pepinsky and Jesilow, 1984)
Many of Pepinsky and Jesilow’s
myths are revisited in the articles
here.
Richard Garside explores ‘crime’
and the processes at play in defining
harmful acts as criminal. Tim Hope
investigates crime statistics and
questions New Labour’s claims about
crime trends and their disingenuous
presentation of research and the
evidence base. Will McMahon and
rCJM No 83.indd 12 25/02/2011 07:43:08

Rebecca Roberts tackle the topic of
ethnicity, harm and crime, arguing
that the ‘myth, that poverty is a
pre-eminent source of harmful or
‘criminal’ behaviour in society, is
weaved in with another myth – that
the black ‘community’ is more
harmful because it experiences
greater harm and deprivation’. They
draw attention to direct
discrimination and the less direct
‘ethnic penalty’ present in
institutional practices and social
structures. The obsession with ‘crime’
in official data ignores a wide range
of harms that never come to the
attention of the criminal justice
system. If we acknowledge the true
scale of harm and victimisation –
and the way in which these harms
are created and perpetuated by
political, social and economic
structures – then it becomes clear
that the criminal justice is never
likely to have anything but a
marginal impact on victimisation.
Charlotte Weinberg emphasises the
inequalities and bias that exist in
criminal justice operations and
highlights the enduring yet
misguided myth of ‘justice’ in an
unequal society.
Brian McIntosh and Annabelle
Phillips challenge popular views that
young people are a key source of
society’s ills. Alex Stevens usefully
unpacks evidence and claims made
that drugs cause crime, offering a
critique of current drug policy.
Stevens locates the cause of much
property and violent crime in a
context of social exclusion. What
becomes clear however is the tricky
business of charting a course
through the inconsistencies and
untruths in research and policy
debate – establishing ‘truth’ is far
from easy.
While Stevens draws attention to
the role of social exclusion and
poverty in crime causation, Lynn
Hancock and Gerry Mooney
question claims that most crime is
committed by people living in
poverty. They draw attention to
evidence that illustrates harmful
behaviour existing across social
classes. If this is the case, given that
prisons are disproportionately full of
those on low incomes, it would
appear that criminal justice operates
as a mechanism for supporting and
maintaining structures of inequality,
diverting attention from far more
serious harms and placing the blame
at the feet of the poor and
marginalised. The process of criminal
justice mystifies rather than clarifies
what is harmful in society and what
might be done about it.
Finally, we have two articles
exploring criminal justice policy. The
first is from Megan O’Neill who
explores the myth that bobbies on
the beat cut crime, pointing out that
reassurance policing is just that, and
has very little to do with cutting
crime. Helen Mills looks at the data
and debates surrounding ‘alternatives
to custody’, questioning popular
claims that community sentences are
an effective way of reducing prison
numbers.
Keeping the myths alive
Criminal justice myths do not
go uncontested in the policy
environment and some explanation
is required of why evidenced based
policy has not snuffed them out.
The US based Political Research
Associates (PRA) argue that many
criminal justice myths are
maintained by those who advocate
for harsher prison sentences and an
expansion of the criminal justice
system. The tactics deployed,
according to the PRA (2005), are the
following:
• Fear mongering – the skilful
manipulation of entrenched
beliefs that are based on racism,
sexism and classism.
• Scapegoating – blames an
individual or group for a problem
they did not necessarily cause.
• Demonisation – portrays a person
or group as sinful and evil to
justify discrimination.
• Data manipulation – in describing
and analysing ‘crime’ in a
way that reflects and supports
particular criminal justice
strategies.
• Co-optation of progressive
language – using language that
appeals to moderates and liberals
to widen the base of support for
regressive policies.
Beyond myth?
If the PRA are correct, it is important
to continue shedding light on
popular misunderstandings about
how the criminal justice system
operates and what it is capable
of delivering; to point to where
the system is unjust and offer an
explanation for these injustices –
both within and outside the criminal
justice system. Such efforts will
help balance the debate and place
the reform of criminal justice in its
broader social context. Advocating
for reforms to make criminal justice
work better is an understandable
endeavour, particularly for those
affected by its day to day operation,
whether through being punished,
working as an employee, or
navigating the system as a ‘victim’
of crime. But if such reforms are
to be advocated then it is essential
that they do not mobilise as part of
their overall argument perhaps the
biggest criminal justice myth of all –
that a reform of criminal justice will
bring about a wholesale change in
levels of safety and security within
society as a whole. While making
the justice system more accountable
and transparent is essential, we
should not overstate what criminal
justice can and should deliver.
It is important to be bold about
communicating the limitations of
criminal justice and therefore the
limitations of reform. n
Rebecca Roberts is Senior Policy Associate at
the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and
Managing Editor of cjm.
References
Pepinsky, H. and Jesilow, P. (1984), The
Myths that Cause Crime, Maryland:
Seven Locks Press.
Political Research Associates (2005),
‘Myths, messages and tactics of the
political right’, in Aziz, N. (ed.),
Defending Justice: An Activist Resource
Kit, www.publiceye.org/defending
justice/overview/myths.html (accessed 6
December 2010).
Reiman, J. (2007), The Rich Get Richer
and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class
and Criminal Justice, 8th ed., London:
Pearson.
cjm no. 83 March 2011 13
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m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
14
New Labour’s crime
statistics: a case of
‘flat earth news’
Tim Hope examines the distortions
behind crime stats.
Of the Three Rs, how good
has New Labour been with
the arithmetic of crime? The
answer depends upon who is doing
the marking. By self-assessment, it
felt it had done remarkably well:
We have had ten years of
sustained investment in crime
reduction – not just financial, but
also expertise, new policy and
legislation, and rigorous focus on
delivery. The benefits are clear:
overall crime has fallen by around
a third since 1997, following
rising crime throughout the 1980s
and first half of the 1990s.
(Home Office, 2007)
Yet New Labour’s actual achievement
with the crime trend has been less
to do with its efforts and more
to do with its skill in rigging the
examination system. Not that there
has been any outright dishonesty;
after all, a system that allows those
sitting the exams to set the questions
and to mark the papers has no need
to cheat; a fact that was never going
to be lost on the new boys of Home
Office House.
‘Lies …’
Habitually, British governments are
reticent about holding themselves to
account, other than when they have
to via the ballot box. So why would
any incoming government want to
set itself the hostage to fortune of
‘evidence-based policy’; what if it
didn’t have much evidence of what
worked; what if the evidence showed
that what it did do subsequently
didn’t work? Still, the happy
circumstance of having enunciated
particularly strident and ambitious
crime reduction plans whilst in
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550152
opposition, winning a landslide
election in 1997 in part on the basis
of such promises, promulgating
programmes and legislation once
in office and thence presiding over
year-on-year reductions in the
official indicators of crime; all must
have seemed incontrovertible. Yet
this is a deception due not just to
the inaccessibility of figures so much
as to the interpretation placed upon
them; and it is the latter that won
New Labour its early successes (at
least in their own minds), even if, as
with so many things, it squandered
public trust in the process.
New Labour’s first senior prefect
(Home Secretary, Jack Straw), put in
place a conceptual apparatus that
would stack the odds in favour of
coming up with success. Two
innovations were
central to this: the
first was
governance via
press release. To
be fair, New
Labour was
merely furthering
the practices that
had brought it
into power.
Indeed, as Nick
Davies (2008) has
shown with Flat
Earth News, the
ability of government to produce
figures, facts and claims that go
unchallenged relies upon the
competitive pressure of 24-hour
news production and the
concentration of media ownership,
which renders news journalists
incapable (even if they wished) of
checking their stories; far easier to
re-hash a press release than to
independently source and
Number confusion
New Labour’s actual
achievement with the
crime trend has been
less to do with its efforts
and more to do with
its skill in rigging the
examination system.
corroborate a story. Second, Straw
sought to co-opt social science into
the machinery of governance of
crime reduction. An aura of scientific
expertise would help quell contrary
challenge (not least from the political
opposition) while the connotation of
scientific progress would appeal to
an awe-struck general public. Here,
the Home Secretary was much
helped by the expert crime scientists
and statisticians within the in-house
Research, Development and Statistics
Directorate
(RDS); an outfit
whose denizens
had been
woefully
neglected by the
previous regime,
scorned alike
both by
politicians and
their academic
peers, subjected
to market-testing
(save for the
reluctance of
anyone to buy them), with only the
occasional Philosopher-Chief
Constable left to impress. A toxic
brew was bubbling away: politicians
who lived by the news, crime
reduction experts who wanted to
make it.
‘… damned lies …’
One of New Labour’s chief
electoral pledges in 1997 was to
rCJM No 83.indd 14 25/02/2011 07:43:10
Photo courtesy of Melinda Kerrison

put government spending itself
upon a more rational, evidencebased
footing through the
first Comprehensive Spending
Review, which required spending
departments to justify the need
for their expenditure. As part of
its case for a large investment in
crime reduction – particularly what
would become known as the Crime
Reduction Programme (CRP; Home
Office, 1999) – the Home Office
produced a revision of its model
of the crime trend. Unlike the
downward trend, this new forecast
appeared to predict a counterintuitive,
26 per cent rise in crime,
particularly in
the key target-
crime of burglary
(Dhiri et al.,
1999). While the
forecast amply
and successfully
demonstrated the
need for massive
investment from
the Treasury
– funding the
experimental CRP and its extra CCTV
add-on to the tune of half a billion
smackers, there was a presentational
problem: if the crime forecast was so
bad, would the public continue to
believe in the government’s promises
or instead call for even more costly
bobbies on the beat; but if crime
wasn’t that bad, why give the cash
away when it could go on schools
and hospitals instead. Some fancy
footwork was needed, so Straw
issued a press release:
There is nothing inevitable about
the trend in the model. Halfway
through this period there is good
evidence we are in fact bucking
the projected trend. Burglary in
the first two years of this period
[i.e. since the general election] is
down, not up; and vehicle crime
is down, not up. This research
therefore underlines the relative
success achieved so far, but also
the scale of the challenge we
must face.
(Jack Straw, quoted in Travis,
1999)
As The Guardian helpfully went on
to explain (presumably briefed by the
Home Office Press Office):
The overarching task,
then, was not so much
to reduce crime but to
be seen and believed to
have reduced crime.
The resulting projections are
based on a forecast of what will
happen if current demographic
and economic trends continue
without any impact from crime
reduction measures taken by the
police and the government.
(Travis, 1999)
So, we have the Home Secretary
gamely rising to the challenge. But
can you see what he did here? The
sleight-of-hand is to insinuate that
‘current demographic and economic
trends’ will necessarily bring about
increases in
crime, while
governmental
crime reduction
measures will
also necessarily
(though not
tautologically)
bring about
reductions. It
follows that this
polarisation
between social forces (bad) and
government actions (good) are the
only drivers of the crime rate, setting
up a titanic struggle from which, if
crime goes down, the government
will emerge victorious.
‘… and crime statistics’
Still, a further twist was necessary
in order to cover the government’s
bet. In the past, statistics of recorded
crime (and more recently from the
British Crime Survey) had been seen
as measuring the public’s demand
for action against crime, placing
responsibility on the government to
provide the necessary resources and
means. In contrast, the Simmons
Review (Home Office, 2000) turned
this definition on its head, suggesting
that the crime statistics should be a
measure of the supply of criminal
justice services, comprising a basis
for the performance management
regime that the government itself was
to impose on the various criminal
justice agencies. After all, the
demand for government action had
already been expressed through the
ballot box, and it was now up to the
government to prove that it could
do the job. A further refinement to
this subtle shift would seek to place
New Labour in a win-win situation:
if crime went down, it could take
the credit, no question; if it didn’t, it
could either (a) blame the criminal
justice services, especially the
police, for their incompetence and/
or (b) blame those darn economic
and social conditions, whose global
origins lay beyond the government’s
control. Either way, it hoped that
the public could be persuaded to
vote in even more resources as New
Labour set its shoulder to the wheel
in its heroic ‘crusade [sic] against
crime’ (Jack Straw in Home Office,
1999: Preface), thus garnering its
just reward at the ballot box. The
overarching task, then, was not so
much to reduce crime but to be seen
and believed to have reduced crime.
Didn’t he do well?
So, how did it all pan out? On the
one hand, head boy Blair managed
to bow-out believing he’d done it
(Hope, 2008b); on the other hand,
his ‘fags’ had to resort to evermore
sleight-of- and under-hand
tactics of pretence. Not surprisingly,
perhaps, to seasoned observers of
the performance of criminal justice
agencies in the face of hare-brained
government schemes, the massive
CRP soon lead to equally massive
muddle, confusion and general
implementation failure across much
of the board. Yet what was the official
response? On the one hand, to
pretend that the CRP wasn’t actually
about delivering crime reduction
but about experimenting with what
works (in the noblest tradition of
management science), and then to
blame all and sundry (except the
management science experts) for not
putting enough effort in to getting
it right; nothing wrong with the
ideas, just feeble political leadership
(from sacked ministers), even more
research and investment needed
(Homel et al., 2004). On the other
hand, officials set about blaming
the evaluators and suppressing
unfavourable evaluation reports
(Hope, 2008c), reanalysing data
to come up with more favourable
results (Hope, 2004, 2008a), and
issuing blatant ministerial press
releases (e.g. Groundbreaking
Projects Crack Burglary, Home
cjm no. 83 March 2011 15
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m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E

m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
Office Press Release 177/2003, 25
June 2003).
But did New Labour get away
with it? Even in
its own lifetime,
parliament began
to suspect it had
been pulling a
fast one with the
facts (STC, 2006),
though officials
continued to
ignore such
criticism as if it
didn’t matter
(Hope, 2008c).
And just as the
independent UK
Statistics
Commission
launched what
was in fact a
rather innocuous enquiry about the
public and private uses of crime
statistics (Statistics Commission,
2006), an evidently paranoid
government not only commissioned
its own, pre-emptive report (Home
Office, 2006) but also abolished the
Statistics Commission itself. And
things went from bad to worse: Not
only had the Home Office taken to
releasing its findings en masse on
‘Research Thursday’, giving
journalists no time to corroborate the
accompanying press releases
(Davies, 2008), but when it became
engulfed in an administrative crisis,
the supposedly new-broom Home
Secretary John Reid banned the
release of any research report for five
months, without explanation. Such
cavalier attitudes to the evidence
continued, earning the Home Office
the distinction of becoming the first
government department to breach on
various occasions the government’s
new Code of Practice for Official
Statistics (UK Statistics Authority,
2009); while a similar incident in
defence of another indefensible
policy – the retention of DNA
records (Pease, 2009) – attracted
immediate condemnation (Goldacre,
2009).
And the rest is silence: Home
Office research reports continue to
dribble out from time to time, though
these often seem pallid reflections of
past standards of quality; and the
Home Office continues to publish its
16
Even in its own lifetime,
parliament began to
suspect it had been
pulling a fast one
with the facts (STC,
2006), though officials
continued to ignore
such criticism as if it
didn’t matter.
annual ‘pictures’ of crime (Crime in
England and Wales) although the
editorial policy continues to allow
plenty of scope for
‘impressionism’
(Hope, 2008d).
Finally, having
been held up until
after the election,
the UK Statistics
Authority
published its
report on
Overcoming
Barriers to Trust in
Crime Statistics
(2010). In January
2011, Home
Secretary Theresa
May announced
that she has asked
the National
Statistician to lead an independent
review into the collection and
publication of crime statistics, and
that the responsibility for their
publication would move from the
Home Office to an independent
body.n
Tim Hope is Professor in Criminology at the
University of Salford, Greater Manchester.
This is an edited version of an essay that
first appeared in Lessons for the Coalition:
an end of term report on New Labour
and criminal justice published by the
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. To
read the essay in full and others in the
collection visit: www.crimeandjustice.
org.uk/endoftermreport.html
References
Davies, N. (2008), Flat Earth News,
London: Chatto and Windus.
Dhiri, S., Brand S., Harries R. and Price
R. (1999), Modelling and Predicting
Property Crime Trends in England and
Wales, Home Office Research Study 199,
London: Home Office.
Goldacre, B. (2009), ‘Bad science’, The
Guardian, 18 July.
Homel, P., Nutley S., Webb B. and Tilley
N. (2004), Investing to Deliver:
Reviewing the Implementation of the
UK Crime Reduction Programme,
Home Office Research Study 281,
London: Home Office.
Home Office (1999), The Government’s
Crime Reduction Strategy, London:
Home Office.
Home Office (2000), Review of Crime
Statistics: A Discussion Document,
London: Home Office.
Home Office (2006), Crime Statistics:
An Independent Review Carried out for
the Secretary of State for the Home
Department, London: Home Office.
Home Office (2007), Cutting Crime:
A New Partnership, 2008-11, London:
Home Office.
Home Office (2011), Crime statistics
review launched, www.homeoffice.gov.
uk/media-centre/press-releases/crimestats,
(accessed 20 January 2011).
Hope, T. (2004), ‘Pretend it works:
evidence and governance in the
evaluation of the Reducing Burglary
Initiative’, Criminology and Criminal
Justice 4(3), pp. 287-308.
Hope, T. (2008a), ‘The first casualty:
evidence and governance in a war
against crime’, in Carlen P. (ed.),
Imaginary Penalities, Cullompton:
Willan.
Hope, T. (2008b), ‘Dodgy evidence –
fallacies and facts of crime reduction’,
Safer Communities, 7(3), pp. 35-38.
Hope, T. (2008c), ‘A firing squad to shoot
the messenger: Home Office peer review
of research’, in Hope T. and Walters R.
(eds.), Critical Thinking about the Uses of
Research, London: Centre for Crime and
Justice Studies.
Hope, T. (2008d), ‘Dodgy evidence –
fallacies and facts of crime reduction,
part 2’, Safer Communities, 7(4), pp.
46-51.
Pease, K. (2009), Annex C: DNA
Retention after S and Marper, London:
Jill Dando Institute.
Statistics Commission (2006), Crime
Statistics: User Perspectives, Statistics
Commission Report No. 30, London:
Statistics Commission.
STC (2006), House of Commons Science
and Technology Committee. Scientific
Advice, Risk and Evidence Based Policy
Making, Seventh Report of Session
2005-06, Volume I Report HC 900-I;
Volume II Oral and Written Evidence HC
900-I, The House of Commons, 26
October 2006.
Travis, A. (1999). ‘Burglary in Britain set
to rise by 30%’, The Guardian, 30
November.
UK Statistics Authority (2009), Statement
on Knife Crime Statistics, 11 December
2008 – Analysis Against the Code of
Practice for Official Statistics, Monitoring
and Assessment Note 1/2009.
UK Statistics Authority (2010),
Overcoming Barriers to Trust in Crime
Statistics: England and Wales, May,
Monitoring Report 5.
rCJM No 83.indd 16 25/02/2011 07:43:10

Recent publications
Including two new publication from CCJS
NEW Lessons for the Coalition:an end of term
report on New Labour and criminal justice
Edited by Arianna Silvestri. An authoritative, independent
assessment of New Labour’s performance in key areas of
criminal justice between 1997 and 2010, including how laws
and policies impacted on practice and research.
NEW Doing justice locally:the North Liverpool
Community Justice Centre
Professor George Mair and Dr Matthew Millings. The report
examines the changes brought about at the North Liverpool
Community Justice Centre - the first and the most ambitious
site of community justice in the UK. The NLCJC includes a
problem-solving approach, greater partnership working,
local community engagement, and having a single judge
with the capacity to review the progress of those sentenced
to a community-based order.
Magistrates’courts’and Crown Court expenditure,
1999-2009
Roger Grimshaw and Helen Mills, with Arianna Silvestri
and Felicia Silberhorn-Armantrading.This is the final in
the series of three briefings on criminal justice spending
supported by the Hadley Trust.The report will be required
reading for policy makers, journalists and anyone with
an interest in public finances and the proper use of
taxpayers’ money.
Prison and probation expenditure,1999-2009
Helen Mills, Arianna Silvestri and Roger Grimshaw with
Felicia Silberhorn-Armantrading. Spending on the
prison and probation system in England and Wales has
grown by 36 percent in real terms since 2004 despite a
major reorganisation that was meant to save money.
Police Expenditure,1999-2009
Helen Mills,Arianna Silvestri and Roger Grimshaw.A
unique overview and detailed analysis of trends in
police authority income and spending in England and
Wales.Essential reading for everyone responsible for
police authority budgets,public representatives,and all
concerned with future public spending budgets in local
and national government.
From criminal justice to social justice:rethinking
approaches to young adults subject to criminal
justice control
Richard Garside.This briefing, the last in a series of
three that form part of the Centre for Crime and
Justice Studies’ contribution to the Transition to
Adulthood Alliance, offers some proposals for what
might be involved in a wholesale shift in governmental
approaches to young adults subject to criminal justice
control. It makes the case for interventions with young
adults that place social justice, not criminal justice, at
their heart.
Risky people or risky societies? Rethinking
interventions for young adults in transition
Richard Garside.This briefing critiques policies
informed by risk factor analysis that seek to prevent
crime by intervening early in the lives of troubled
children. Garside proposes a different way to think
about risk as a social factor rather than an individual
pathology. This is the first of three briefings published
by the Centre as part of its contribution to the
Transition to Adulthood Alliance, supported by the
Barrow Cadbury Trust.
Comparing coercive and non-coercive
interventions
Professor James McGuire.The incidence of imprisonment
for under-18s in England and Wales is one of the highest
in the world. James McGuire examines the evidence that
shows resorting to incarceration and strict control has
little or no benefit in reducing reconviction.This is the
second of three briefings published by the Centre as part
of its contribution to the Transition to Adulthood Alliance,
supported by the Barrow Cadbury Trust.
Estimating drug harms:a risky business?
Professor David Nutt.Taking a drug is not currently
illegal in the UK, and while there have been attempts to
make it so, the most reasoned arguments suggest this
is not a particularly useful way of reducing harm. In this
briefing, which is an edited transcript of the Eve Saville
lecture, Professor David Nutt discusses drug regulation,
control and politics and suggests a way forward on the
drugs debate.
Young people, knives and guns
Arianna Silvestri, Mark Oldfield, Professor Peter Squires
and Dr Roger Grimshaw.This report examines rigorous
and independent international evidence over the decade
1998-2008 to critically assess the effectiveness of antiweapons
interventions and policies. It also looks at how
various strands of research can aid our understanding of
the circumstances, values and meanings underpinning
some young people’s involvement in weapon carrying
and violence.
All the reports are available to download from the CCJS website www.crimeandjustice.org.uk
Hard copies are available at the full price.For all CCJS members there is a 25% discount.
To order a copy of any of these publications or enquire about CCJS membership please e-mail info@crimeandjustice.org.uk
rCJM No 83.indd 17 25/02/2011 07:43:11

m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
In the course of everyday life men
and women, children and adults,
enter into social relationships with
each other. These relationships
enrich their lives and are at the heart
of what it means to be human. They
are the psychological foundations of
what we call ‘society’.
These relationships can also be
marked by conflict. The persistent
domination of women by men under
the structures of patriarchy has
marked most societies, modern and
pre-modern. Hostility and suspicion
of the ‘other’, justified by the
ideologies of racism and
xenophobia, have been common
features. The exploitation by some of
their social power against others –
employees by employers, tenants by
landlords, peasants by lords, slaves
by slave owners – is seemingly
perennial.
In some cases conflicts are
accorded a specific and technical
character: For instance certain
interpersonal violence; certain
appropriations of the property;
certain breaches
of regulatory
rules. These acts,
defined and
prohibited by the
criminal law, are
referred to
collectively as
‘crime’.
Those who
engage in crime
talk they often
think they are talking about the most
significant or important forms of
social conflict. But this is often not
the case. ‘Crime’ as a unit of analysis
is also slippery and subjective.
Law is the cause of crime
To say that an act is a crime if
defined by the law is little more
than tautological. Jerome Michael
and Mortimer Adler concluded
18
Crime: myth or reality?
Richard Garside considers definitions of
crime in the myth making process.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550151
Definitions of crime
reflect and reinforce
the underlying political
settlement and the
balance of social forces.
some years ago that ‘the criminal
law is the formal cause of crime’.
This is so, they argued, not because
‘the law produces the behaviour
which it prohibits’, but because
it gives certain acts their ‘quality
of criminality. Without a criminal
code there would be no crime’
(Michael and Adler, 1933). This may
formally be correct, but there is
something missing. As Michael and
Adler acknowledge, criminal law
defines acts as criminal. It does not,
generally speaking, cause individuals
or organisations to commit those
acts. The acts themselves are
objective social events. Their
definition as ‘crime’ is subjective.
Crime defined
Definitions of ‘crime’ are also
historically and spatially contingent.
They are historically contingent
because they change through time.
In the UK acts that were once
deemed criminal (for instance
consensual homosexual sex) are
now legal. Other acts that were once
legal are now
criminalised. It
was only in 1991
that rape within
marriage was
criminalised in
UK. Definitions
of ‘crime’
are spatially
contingent
because they vary
across countries,
regions and jurisdictions. Acts
criminalised in some jurisdictions are
not in others, and vice versa.
What gets defined as crime and
who gets to decide is also a political
matter. In a simple sense the
government and members of
parliament set the parameters of
criminal law, not judges,
criminologists or the ‘general public’.
More significantly, definitions of
crime reflect and reinforce the
underlying political settlement and
the balance of social forces. Acts and
omissions currently defined as crime
in the UK largely amount to ‘vast
numbers of petty events which
would score relatively low on scales
of seriousness’ (Hillyard and Tombs,
2008). Meanwhile many acts and
omissions that are either very
harmful, or widespread in their
impact, or both, are either not
defined as crime, or are subject to
lax regulation: For example
workplace health and safety
breaches, environmental pollution
and state violence.
So there is a distinction to be
drawn between an objective act and
its impact and the socially subjective
act of defining it as crime. There is
nothing intrinsic to those acts
defined as crime (Hulsman, 1986).
This is not to say that some acts
defined as crime do not cause harm.
Homicide, sexual violence and the
abuse of children, to name but a few,
are profoundly harmful. Any civilised
society should reflect this in the
response made to such acts. Yet
contemporary debates about crime,
whether in politics or popular
culture, the academy or policy
making, are also a species of mythmaking
and mystification. It is the
underlying act, its causes and harms,
not the social definition, that
ultimately matters. n
Richard Garside is Director at the Centre for
Crime and Justice Studies.
References
Hillyard, P. and Tombs, S. (2008),
‘Beyond criminology?’, in Dorling, D.,
Gordon, D., Hillyard, P., Pantazis, C.,
and Pemberton, S. (eds.), Criminal
Obsessions: Why Harm Matters More
Than Crime, London: Centre for Crime
and Justice Studies, www.crimeand
justice.org.uk/criminalobsessions2.html
(accessed on 17 January 2011).
Hulsman, L. (1986), ‘Critical criminology
and the concept of crime’, republished in
Muncie, J. (ed.), Criminology. Volume 1:
The Meaning of Crime, London: Sage,
2006.
Michael, J. and Adler, M.J. (1933), ‘The
nature of crime’, republished in Muncie,
J. (ed.), Criminology. Volume 1: The
Meaning of Crime, London: Sage, 2006.
rCJM No 83.indd 18 25/02/2011 07:43:11

305910B_Economies & Insecurities_ad 8/12/10 15:52 Page 1
Economies and Insecurities of Crime and Justice
3–6 July 2011
British Society of Criminology Annual Conference 2011
Keynote speakers:
Jackie Harvey Liz Kelly Mike Levi Ian Loader Jill Peay Stephen Shaw Loïc Wacquant
This conference encompasses the applied and theoretical nature of contemporary criminology.
The key focus is on Economies and Insecurities of Crime and Justice.
Economic crisis, public spending and the criminal justice sector
Recessional climates and the landscapes of criminal enterprise
The political economies of crime, crime control and criminal justice
Social exclusion, consumer culture and criminal enterprise
The academic and practitioner interface – global to North East
Fear, insecurity and victimisation
Global economies and local insecurities
Northumbria University City Campus East
For more information please visit
www.northumbria.ac.uk/bscconference
Economies and Insecurities
of Crime and Justice
rCJM No 83.indd 19 25/02/2011 07:43:13

m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
20
Truth and lies about
‘race’ and ‘crime’
Will McMahon and Rebecca Roberts
consider ethnicity, harm and crime.
Periodically, political and media
discourse focuses on the myth
of ‘Black on Black crime’, or
the supposed threat of young Black
men to safety of the presumed
law-abiding majority. In 2007,
following the fatal shooting of three
non-White teenage boys in south
London, Prime Minister Tony Blair
said ‘this is not a metaphor for the
state of British society … it is a
specific problem, in a specific
criminal culture among specific
groups of young people’. In the
following April, Blair went further,
arguing ‘The Black community …
need to be mobilised in denunciation
of this gang culture that is killing
innocent young Black kids. But we
won’t stop this by pretending it isn’t
young Black kids doing it.’
Sections of the media amplified
the view that specific communities
and cultures were to blame. The
Times portrayed ‘armed police sent
out in force on a mission to reclaim
the badlands’ suggesting imagery of
a Black ‘hinterland’ where ‘Black on
Black crime’ takes place (Tendler and
Ford, 2007). The Independent (2007)
described the areas where the
killings took place as ‘a swamp’ and
its editorial noted that ‘these latest
shootings have fallen under the
category of so-called ‘Black-on-
Black’ crime’ – and then moved on
to a familiar argument – ‘it is clear
that there is a significant lack of
positive role models for young Black
boys. Black fathers often play too
small a role in the lives of their
children. There is also a shortage of
Black male teachers. Gangsters and
drug dealers often fill the void in the
lives of impressionable and angry
young men. This dynamic is
reinforced by a popular culture that
often irresponsibly glorifies
criminality, violence and misogyny.’
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550153
This construction by both Prime
Minister and press of the ‘Black
community’ (whatever that is) having
a particular social order problem
prompted us to review the evidence
base in 2008. Our conclusion being
that the ‘Black on Black crime
problem’ was a myth, as was the
view that young Black men are a
significant source of harm to society;
instead we found they are subject to
multiple and serious harms because
of the society in which they live
(McMahon and Roberts, 2008).
Criminal justice myth making
To begin to understand the contours
of public debate about ‘Black
criminality’ we explored a myriad
of political speeches, government
sources, media coverage and
policy reports. We noted a clear
tendency for political and media
commentators to hone in on ‘gangsta
rap’, gun and knife violence, and
drug offences. While caution is
exercised in the language used
in identifying the locus of the
‘problem’, there is a common thread:
‘Black communities’ are said to
be experiencing a crisis of poor
and single parenting, and underachievement
at school. A lack of
aspirations and opportunities for
young Black men, and a pervasive
negative and harmful culture that
results in deprivation, hardship and a
consequent high rate of criminality.
This view is re-enforced by the
disproportionately high numbers of
Black people in prisons in England
and Wales. The October 2010
Equality and Human Rights
Commission report How Fair is
Britain? found that the incarceration
of Black people is almost seven times
higher than their share of the
population, compared with, for
example, four times greater in the
United States. A convenient myth
explanation would be that these
incarceration rates are a result of the
high rates of unemployment and
poverty that are experienced by
Black people and more specifically
young Black men. One myth, that
poverty is the pre-eminent source of
harmful or ‘criminal’ behaviour in
society, is weaved in with another
myth – that the Black ‘community’ is
more harmful because it experiences
greater poverty and deprivation. We
question these assumptions and the
recurrent presumption that ‘young
Black men’ are a significant source
of harm in society.
Research shows that, in its
operation, the criminal justice system
is often partial and biased – with
operational policy tending to
emphasise street-based ‘crime’ in
low income areas resulting in more
than half of young Black males’
records being held on the DNA
database. This offers a substantial
part of the explanation for the
disproportionate numbers of Black,
mostly young, men in criminal
justice and contributes significantly
to an amplification of the belief in a
‘Black crime problem’.
Current definitions of crime and
the associated activities of the
criminal justice system distort and
disguise the true range of harms
experienced in society. For example,
the scope and effects of the social
and economic inequalities that Black
and ethnic minority people
experience extends far wider and
much deeper than the homicides and
robberies committed by young Black
men.
Punitive interventions
Our 2008 review of the data
showed that, beyond the high
incarceration rates, many Black
males are disproportionately subject
to punitive interventions including
school exclusions, high rates of
stop and search and mental health
interventions. Ethnic minority people
often experience an additional array
of harmful measures inflicted by
state institutions in what is claimed
to be an attempt to either protect the
individuals concerned or the wider
community; one recent example
being the October 2010 death of
rCJM No 83.indd 20 25/02/2011 07:43:13

Jimmy Mubenga, a 46-year-old
Angolan refugee, who collapsed
and died after employees of G4S
private security firm put him on to
a BA flight at Heathrow, was the
result of the operations of the UK
Border Agency that is supposed to
be ‘responsible for securing the UK
border and controlling migration in
the UK’.
Beyond the immediate physical
harms experienced in state
institutions, the data also showed
that Black people suffered an
enduring ‘ethnic penalty’ that left
them at the wrong end of almost
every major social indicator. Higher
rates of poverty, worse educational
outcomes, higher rates of
unemployment and homelessness
and overall poorer health outcomes,
with young Black men experiencing
the worst outcomes of all.
Voluntary services
However, because the policy frame
of reference for young Black men is
usually to ‘reduce crime’, public and
voluntary services and agencies are
encouraged to view and publicise
their activities as crime reduction
initiatives. In many cases, funding
and political support is contingent
on crime reduction claims and this
itself re-inforces the myth that Black
communities have a specific ‘crime’
problem. Haggerty (2008) sums up
the process:
It is poignant to see the
following programmes reduced
to being elements of crime
prevention initiatives: adult basic
education, vocational training,
drug treatment, improving the
self-esteem of disadvantaged
youths, homework instruction,
academic tutoring, family
planning, mentoring, after-school
programming (including music
lessons, sports, dance and scouts),
job training for disadvantaged
youths, litter and graffiti removal,
midnight basketball, group
counseling for students with
alcoholic parents and so on. Many
proponents of such programmes
only started to appeal to the
crime reduction potential of their
initiatives when they found neoconservatives
were uninterested
in arguments that the value of
such programmes lies in providing
disadvantaged people with hope
and the prospect of a meaningful
existence.
Consequently, the social harms that
people experience are, once again,
transformed into a ‘crime’ problem
of the ‘Black community’. Through
a ‘social harm lens’ (Pemberton,
2007), it is possible to understand the
over-representation of Black people
in criminal justice not as an outcome
of a specific problem in the ‘Black
community’ but as the product of
socio-economic and historical forces.
The socio-economic positioning
of ethnic minority people within
British society is not an accident but
the historical product of a series of
relationships between the colonial
empire established by Britain. Davey
Smith (2000) suggests that ‘the
current form of socio-economic
disadvantage faced by British ethnic
minority communities, in an age
when the “reserve army of labour” is
waiting to meet labour requirements
that currently do not exist, can be
understood only in the light of their
history’.
Social harms
Criminal justice cannot help
overcome the disproportionate
social harms, not only because it
is self-evidently the wrong tool for
the job, but also because Black
people experience it as a source of
social harm to them itself. Instead,
the challenge is to consider a wide
range of social problems without
mobilising the Black crime myth as a
necessary explanation.
Our claim is not that ethnic
minority people are neither victims
nor commissioners of acts often
defined as ‘crime’. What we are
saying is that by focusing
predominantly on many acts through
the narrow framework of criminal
justice, there is a tendency to place
disproportionate emphasis on
particular people and young Black
men and thereby construct a Black
crime myth. Policy and political
descriptions of the ‘crime problem’
often conflates ‘Black’ and ‘poor’
with criminality and reinforces
imagery that equates ‘young and
Black’ with ‘criminal’. What is more,
the apparent threat to social order
posed by the actions of young Black
men is given much greater weight
than the serious, socially mediated
harms faced by some ethnic
minorities. Indeed, our point is that
every early death or serious harm,
whatever the source, is worthy of
sober policy, political and social
consideration. However, any serious
attempt to develop coherent policy
responses to the harms affecting
Black and ethnic minority people
needs to consider a broad range of
harms rather than merely fixating
narrowly on the ‘crime problem’. n
Will McMahon is Policy Director and
Rebecca Roberts is Senior Policy Associate at
the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and
co-authors of Ethnicity, Harm and Crime: A
Discussion Paper.
References
Davey Smith, G. (2000), ‘Learning to live
with complexity: ethnicity, socioeconomic
position and health in Britain
and the United States’, American Journal
of Public Health, 90(11), pp. 1694-1698.
Haggerty, K. (2008), ‘Book review:
Lawrence W. Sherman, David P.
Farrington, Brandon C. Welsh and Doris
Layton MacKenzie (eds.), Evidence Based
Crime Prevention’, Theoretical
Criminology, 12(1), pp. 116-121.
McMahon, W. and Roberts, R. (2008),
Ethnicity, Harm and Crime: A Discussion
Paper, London: Centre for Crime and
Justice Studies, www.crimeandjustice.
org.uk/ehcresponses.html (accessed 17
January 2011).
Pemberton, S. (2007), ‘Social harm
future(s): exploring the potential of the
social harm approach’, Crime, Law and
Social Change, 48(1-2), pp. 27-41.
The Independent (2007), ‘A swamp of
alienation, deprivation and despair’, The
Independent, 16 February.
Tendler, S. and Ford, R. (2007), ‘Armed
police sent out in force on a mission to
reclaim the badlands’, The Times, 16
February.
cjm no. 83 March 2011 21
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m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E

m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
Justice is a way of being,
not a moment in court
England and Wales currently has
139 per 100,000 of its
population in prison (85,393
people); more than any other
European country (and more than
Libya, Malaysia and Burma) (Ministry
of Justice, 2010). The UK locks up
more of its young people than any of
its counterpart nation states (roughly
2.5 per cent of all prisoners in
England and Wales are under 18),
one of the highest proportions in the
rich world (The Economist, 2009),
despite the fact that according to the
Home Office (2010), crime is
actually on the decrease. So
apparently we have less crime, and
yet we have more people in prison
than ever. Does that sound
reasonable? Not to me.
I am not sure that prison is a
useful tool in social cohesion or
development and I think prison is an
issue of huge concern for any society
with social equality or reasonable
sanctions and civil liberties as an
aspiration. This article accepts that
prison exists, but will interrogate
how it is used, by whom, for what
purpose and with what effect.
Official statistics show that
between 1993 and 2001, the
population of women prisoners
increased by 145 per cent
(Goodchild, 2001). Civil liberties
campaigners have argued for a long
time that defendants are not given
fair hearings because magistrates are
predominantly white, middle-class
men (ibid). Over half the prison
population of both genders have
been found guilty of acquisitive
crimes such as burglary or handling
stolen goods; so economic factors
– however you analyse these – are a
crucial element of the picture. The
fact is the vast majority of the prison
population are working-class men,
with disproportionate representation
22
Charlotte Weinberg discusses the myth of
justice in an unequal society.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550154
from minority ethnic groups.
Nationally, black people are at least
six times more likely to be stopped
than white people under stop and
search law (Equality and Human
Rights Commission, 2010).
Violent offenders are thought to
make up only a very small
percentage of the current prison
population. Imprisoning people
therefore has very little to do with
guaranteeing the safety of society
(Buckland, 2006). Theft is the most
common indictable offence for both
male and female offenders and when
a young man is charged with
burglary or theft, he is likely to be
bailed if it is his first offence; his
female counterpart is likely to be
remanded. ‘It’s inevitable that
magistrates come with their own
prejudices. The tradition has been of
middle-class magistrates keeping the
working classes under control and
it’s very hard to get rid of this
tradition. This [the legal system] is
one area when you could still bring a
charge of sexism because of the
social expectations of women’
(Goodchild, 2001).
Who judges justice?
Even leaving aside the issue of
which crimes get discovered and
concentrating on those that are,
when people do come into contact
with the system it seems there
are some anomalies at work. Our
criminal justice system operates
through a variety of agents:
police, courts, probation, prison,
and involves many structures of
judgement before getting to a judge.
At every step of the way
throughout our criminal justice
system, judgements are being made:
Is an accusation judged worthy of
police attention? Is a case judged to
be substantial enough to warrant a
Scales of injustice
court’s attention? Is the plaintiff
judged worthy of protection/belief?
(Cross)-culturally we have a set of
criteria by which we determine
‘good’ and ‘bad’. This is sometimes
referred to as the moral compass. It is
the set of values and attitudes by
which we determine how we expect
each other to act. Criminal law sets
out in practice how we expect each
other to respect property, the body
and transactional activity – sex and
the use of classified drugs are
criminalised under certain
circumstances. Violence against the
person, assault, attack, aggravated
burglary, racially motivated or hate
crime, theft, handling stolen goods,
rape, abduction, kidnap, murder,
criminal damage, and anti-terrorism
laws are all extensions of the implicit
‘moral code’ by which we expect
each other to abide. Deviate from
this punishment will supposedly
ensue.
Innocence, guilt and the myth
of fair hearing
Punishment however, may look
slightly different depending on who
you are, where you are and who
finds out about what you have done.
Who gets caught is not necessarily
the same thing as who commits
crime. Who goes to prison is not
necessarily the same thing as who is
guilty or worthy of ‘punishment’.
There are people in prison who
have committed some very violent
and unacceptable crimes. I am not
suggesting there need be no way of
recognising and responding to these
crimes, nor that people should be
absolved of their responsibility.
Sometimes however, I do believe that
those most in need of holistic
approaches are sent for punishment
while those most abusive of privilege
are free to perpetuate their crimes.
rCJM No 83.indd 22 25/02/2011 07:43:14
Photo courtesy of Melinda Kerrison

We can all think of cases where
priests, ‘nice neighbours’, city
bankers and high profile MPs or
public figures have been discovered
to have been committing offences
belatedly because
our cultural norms
judge certain
people to be less
likely to commit
crime than others.
These norms
mean it is harder
for us to imagine
a teacher/lawyer/
MP/doctor/prison
officer/police
officer to be
capable of
contradicting the very moral code s/
he is in post to protect.
Race, class and gender play
important roles in our perceptions,
applications and expectations of
justice, not only in the UK but
around the world. In 2002 in the UK
there were more African Caribbean
entrants to prison (over 11,500) than
there were to universities (around
8,000). Forty-eight per cent of
prisoners are at, or below, the level
expected of an 11-year-old in
reading, 65 per cent in numeracy
and 82 per cent in writing (Prison
Reform Trust, 2010). The simple
dichotomy of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’
does little to illuminate the nuanced
and sophisticated range of impacts
that social
learning and
discrimination
can have on
criminal activity.
Racism, sexism,
homophobia and
class structures
mean that very
often even people
guilty of criminal
activity are on
trial less for their crime than for their
backstory.
A vision of just justice
A justice system that aims to address
justice must surely operate within a
context of social equality. That might
mean that the law and the sanctions
for offending must become clearer;
so that any abuse of power is noticed
in the context of impinging on our
. . . those most in need
of holistic approaches
are sent for punishment
while those most
abusive of privilege are
free to perpetuate their
crimes.
A justice system that
aims to address justice
must surely operate
within a context of
social equality.
justice; so that the teacher that shouts
or ridicules a student, the doctor that
inappropriately touches a patient,
the priest that contradicts his own
sermon, the lawyer that buys cocaine
from his client,
the footballer
who abuses a
woman or has a
fight at a club, the
MP who falsely
accounts for
public funds (and
the list goes on)
must be seen in
the same light as
the drug dealer,
gang member,
prostitute and
everyone else brought before the
courts.
But what then if we also
acknowledge that no two people are
the same, no set of circumstances is
the same and no single response to
any situation can be the same – ‘You
can never stand in the same river
twice’ (Heraclitus). This then requires
that we adjust the very basis upon
which our understanding of justice
and a justice system is based.
‘Dealing equally with those who are
unequal simply creates more
inequality’ (Kennedy, 1992). There
must be only one system and it must
be founded in a principle of law that
applies equally, even if the law itself
cannot ever be applied equally.
Everyone must
know that justice
is a system
established less to
maintain social
order than to
engender social
cohesion; not so
much to create
punishment and
sentencing
guidelines as to
offer incentives to live lives with
each other’s best interests at heart. A
system of justice based on people’s
potential, social development and
our collective abilities to think of
ways to enhance our lives and unite
our communities.
This is a system of justice based
on principles, values and ethics not
currently embodied in law. It is a
system in which we all expect to be
treated with fair and clear
boundaries, with reasonable
responses and with purposeful
sanctions that contribute to our
common aims.
This is a system of justice that
operates even outside the courts,
outside the police station or
probation office. It is a way of life,
complemented by our cultural
norms, our expectations of each
other, our language, our fiscal and
foreign policies, our departments for
housing, health and the Home
Office.
Creating a legal framework which
is truly equitable means a real
overhaul of our legal thinking. The
institution itself has to change.
Only then will the law be just.
(Kennedy, 1992) n
Charlotte Weinberg is the Chief Executive of
Safe Ground.
References
Buckland, S. (2006), Capitalism, crime
and punishment, Workers Liberty,
www.workersliberty.org/publications/
solidarity/solidarity-386-12-january-2006
(accessed 17 January 2011).
The Economist (2009), Growing Up
Banged Up, www.economist.com/
node/14281786?story_id=14281786
(accessed 17 January 2011).
Equality and Human Rights Commission
(2010), ‘Stop and search implementation
stop and think: a critical review of the
use of stop and search powers in England
and Wales’, p. 5.
Goodchild, S. (2001), ‘Fay Weldon
condemns middle-class magistrates’, The
Independent, www.independent.co.uk/
news/uk/crime/fay-weldon-condemnsmiddleclass-magistrates-689635.html
(accessed 17 January 2011).
Home Office (2010), Statistical News
Release Crime in England and Wales:
Quarterly Update to June 2010.
Kennedy, H. (1992), Eve was Framed
Women and British Justice, London:
Vintage Press, p. 14.
Ministry of Justice (2010), Prison
population and accommodation
briefing for 19 November 2010,
www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/
resourcecentre/publicationsdocuments/
index.asp?cat=85 (accessed 19
November 2010).
Prison Reform Trust (2010), Prison
Briefing, July, p. 2.
cjm no. 83 March 2011 23
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m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
24
Are drugs to blame?
Alex Stevens considers the evidence on
drug-related crime.
Myths are useful. In recent
years, the myths that drugs
cause about half of both
violent and property crimes have
been heavily used by both
academics and politicians. This short
article will trace and criticise the
development and deployment of this
idea. Even if it has been put to some
good purposes, it
has served to
obscure the link
between socioeconomic
deprivation and
crime.
Drugs and
crime
Academically,
we can trace this
notion back to
the most heavily
cited framework
for analysing
the relationship
between drugs
and crime. Paul Goldstein’s (1985)
article posited a tripartite link from
drugs to violence. It has since
garnered nearly 250 citations,
putting it way ahead of its nearest
rivals for ‘impact’ in the Social
Sciences Citation Index. Goldstein
and colleagues (1989) developed
an empirical test of this framework
by applying it to 414 murders in
New York City in 1988. They found
that 53 per cent of them fitted into
their three categories of drug-related
crime. This study related only to
murder and was done at the height
of the crack epidemic – one of the
most violent years in a violent city’s
history. A close reading of the 1989
study shows how it misclassifies
several of the murders in its sample.
The authors did not test the tripartite
framework. They started from the
assumption that it was valid, and
then shoehorned in crimes to fit their
assumption, in viciously circular
New Labour continued
its efforts to manage
away the impacts
of crime on poor
communities, its
servants developed the
exaggeration of drugrelated
crime.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550155
fashion. This has not prevented
Goldstein’s tripartite framework
from achieving academic renown,
along with the claim that drugs are
responsible for half of murder.
Political myths
It is not so easy to trace the origin
of the political myths on drugs and
crime, although a
likely candidate
is a speech that
Tony Blair gave
in 1994. He
claimed that
drugs cause half
of property crime.
As he continued
his famously
successful
campaign to wrest
the issue of law
and order from
his Conservative
opponents’ grasp,
he stepped up
the rhetoric,
making drugs the cause of crime on
which New Labour could afford to
be tough. In a policy paper of 1996,
Jack Straw included drugs amongst
a list of social causes of crime
that Labour promised to deal with
once in power. But after the 1997
election was won, drug use was the
only issue that
featured directly
in crime policy
making, with the
inclusion of the
Drug Treatment
and Testing
Order (DTTO)
in the Crime
and Disorder
Act 1998.
Parliamentary
debates on the
DTTO featured many claims on the
nature and scale of drug-related
crime. The most heavily inflated
came from Tessa Jowell, who
The government beefed
up the powers available
to the police for the
Drug Interventions
Programme.
claimed that drugs were behind 70
per cent of crime.
The DTTO was not the only
policy outcome of this focus on
drug-related crime. It was also used
by treatment and probation
professionals in the newly formed
Anti-Drug Coordination Unit and
National Treatment Agency to argue
for significant new investment in
drug treatment. Their argument that
treatment is the solution to drugrelated
crime was evidently
persuasive. The numbers in treatment
more than doubled in the subsequent
decade and waiting lists fell as
money poured into the drug
treatment system.
Drugs Act 2005
As New Labour continued its efforts
to manage away the impacts of crime
on poor communities, its servants
developed the exaggeration of drugrelated
crime. In a 2003 policy paper
that prepared the way for the Drugs
Act 2005, civil servants claimed that
drugs cause 56% of the total number
of crimes on the basis of their
‘team analysis’ of the New-ADAM
study. This was a study that asked
arrestees to provide a urine sample
for testing, and to answer questions
about their offending. It showed that
high proportions of these arrestees
were drug users. But its authors
have repeatedly warned against the
assumption of a simple, mono-causal
link from drug use to crime. Indeed,
their multi-variate analysis showed
that socio-economic variables – such
as poor education, unemployment
and homelessness– were more
important in predicting the frequency
of offending.
Another reason
to doubt the
civil servants’
analysis is that
the New-ADAM
study did not use
a random sample
of offenders.
It studied only
those who were
unfortunate or
incompetent
enough to be arrested. Other studies
of self-reported offenders have shown
that drug users are significantly more
likely than non-drug using offenders
rCJM No 83.indd 24 25/02/2011 07:43:15

to be arrested. Studies of arrestees
will therefore exaggerate the scale of
drug-related crime.
Exaggeration
Another exaggeration was then
included in policy making, despite
explicit advice not to do so by its
authors. Their ‘preliminary’ estimate
was that the annual cost of drugrelated
crime in 2000 was £13.9
billion. It was based on reports by
drug users entering treatment in
the NTORS study of their offending
over the previous three months.
However, other studies have shown
that, first, drug users entering
treatment are atypical of the drug
using population; their problems
and offending are more intense. And
second, their offending tends to peak
in the weeks immediately before
treatment entry, making it unsafe
to extrapolate from NTORS’ three
months for some users to an entire
year for all users.
In the Drugs Act 2005, the
government beefed up the powers
available to the police for the Drug
Interventions Programme. This
programme aimed, in the words of
the 2003 policy report, to ‘grip’ ‘high
harm causing users’ of heroin and
crack and to coordinate their
treatment through the criminal
justice system. It led to the
introduction of rapid referral to
opiate substitution treatment in many
areas. However, this emphasis on
treatment did not lead to a reduction
in the use of imprisonment for drug
offences. On the contrary, the size of
this category of prisoners increased
by 91% between 1996 and 2008 in
England and Wales, with particularly
rapid increases for foreign nationals
and members of visible minorities.
Neither did the introduction of
treatment alternatives – such as the
DTTO and its 2005 replacement, the
Drug Rehabilitation Requirement –
reduce the overall number of people
sentenced to prison. This number
stayed stable at around 90,000 per
year, while the numbers of people
sentenced to treatment in the
community increased from 2,000 to
12,000.
Deployment of the myths
So the deployment of the myths
of drug-related crime led both
to increased treatment and to a
widening of the penal net. They
also diverted attention from the
other social issues that Labour had
identified while in opposition. US
evidence is instructive on this point.
Reductions in crime there have often
been attributed to the reduction
in the size of markets for crack.
However, other researchers have
shown that crime fell fastest in cities
that reduced their levels of socioeconomic
deprivation, regardless
of the size of their drug market. In
some states, crime has fallen while
drug use has stayed stable (Zimring,
2010). In others, crime has stayed
stable while drug use fell (Dobkin
and Nicosia, 2009). There appears to
be no direct link between levels of
drug use and levels of crime, even if
many offenders use drugs.
The myths of drug-related crime
have also served to strengthen the
discursive link between drug use and
deviance. If drugs are seen, as they
have been by one particularly
ignorant politician, as ‘the greatest
cause of all crime’, then it is less
likely that people will welcome
attempts to reduce punishment of
users. The drug–crime link reinforces
the idea that illicit drug use is
inherently pathological, rather than
– as it is in most cases – relatively
harmless, subterranean play (Young,
1971).
The Coalition Government seems
to be less entranced by these myths
than its predecessor, although it has
used the £13.9 billion exaggeration
of the costs of drug-related crime (for
example, in the recent public health
White Paper). It still presents drug
treatment as a way to reduce crime,
but the focus is now tilted towards
getting drug users to ‘recover’ to
abstinence, rather than reducing
their offending through enrolment in
opiate substitution programmes.
There are now encouraging signs that
the use of heroin, especially by
injection, is falling in England (Hay
et al., 2010). The expansion of drug
treatment may well have played a
part in this welcome trend. If this is
true, then the use of the myths of
drug-related crime may have
produced some benefit. The danger
is that – as the axe falls on welfare,
housing and education budgets – the
myths of drug-related crime will
continue to justify a penal rather
than a social approach to
problematic drug use. n
Alex Stevens is Professor in Criminal Justice
at the University of Kent, and author of Drugs,
Crime and Public Health: The Political Economy
of Drug Policy (Routledge, 2011). Further
references can be found in this book, which
discusses the drug-crime link in more detail.
References
Dobkin, C. and Nicosia, N. (2009), ‘The
war on drugs: methamphetamine, public
health, and crime’, American Economic
Review, 99, pp. 324-349.
Goldstein, P. (1985), ‘The drugs-violence
nexus: a tripartite framework’, Journal of
Drug Issues, 15, pp. 493-506.
Goldstein, P., Brownstein, H., Ryan, P.
and Bellucci, P. (1989), ‘Crack and
homicide in New York: a conceptually
based event analysis’, Contemporary
Drug Problems, 16, pp. 651-687.
Hay, G., Gannon, M., and Casey, J.
(2010), National and Regional Estimates
of the Prevalence of Opiate Use and/or
Crack Cocaine Use 2008/09: A Summary
of Key Findings, London: National
Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse.
Young, J. (1971), The Drugtakers: The
Social Meaning of Drug Use, London:
Paladin.
Zimring, F. (2010), Podcast: The Decline
in Crime in New York City (1990 - 2010),
New York: Vera Institute, www.vera.org/
files/franklin-zimring-the-decline-incrime-new-york-city-transcription.pdf
(accessed 17 January 2011)
cjm no. 83 March 2011 25
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‘Saints and scroungers’:
constructing the poverty
and crime myth
According to the old adage,
‘the devil makes work for idle
hands’! For many, the
connections between poverty and
crime are a matter of common sense;
little scrutiny is required. Our
concern is to look at how common
sense understandings are re-made
and to challenge some common
misconceptions about poverty and
crime.
We have used the word ‘myth’ in
our title, but we are not referring to
simple falsehoods about poverty and
crime – although de-bunking these is
important. Rather, we wish to apply
Flood’s (2002) discussion of ‘political
myths’ in this context. As Flood
(2002) puts it: ‘a political myth can
be said to exist when accounts of a
more or less common sequence of
events, involving more or less the
same principal actors, subject to
more or less the same overall
interpretation and implied meaning,
circulate within a social group’. We
are concerned with how political
myths are circulated, the authority
and the pervasiveness of the
messages, and the functions of these
myths.
Principal actors
The ‘principal actors’ in this case
are working-class people, including
those in receipt of welfare benefits,
who are frequently assumed to
be more feckless, immoral and
criminally-inclined than more
affluent groups in popular discourse;
and such assumptions are often
gendered, racist as well as classed
(see Smith et al., 2010). In the
context of contemporary antiwelfarism
assertions based on these
ideas are particularly potent and
26
Lynn Hancock and Gerry Mooney question
the supposed links between poverty,
immorality and crime.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550156
both inform and are reproduced in
media portrayals of disadvantaged
social groups and places.
The growing literature on crimes
of the powerful (corporations and
states) however clearly illustrates
how actors with the most economic
and political power routinely cause
financial loss, harm and suffering on
a much larger scale, and how the
law so frequently fails to encompass
or punish powerful offenders (see
Tombs and Whyte, 2010, and
references). Studies of corporate
crimes demonstrate the crucial role
of the market economy, and the
state’s role in its nurture, for
understanding both the commission
of crime and the avoidance of blame
for these perpetrators. In a related
vein, Karstedt and Farrall (2007)
argue that transformations in the
market economy are pivotal for
understanding how ‘the seething
mass of morally dubious and outright
criminal behaviour is embedded in
an erosion of moral standards
amongst the respectable middle
classes of England and Wales’.
Routine practices such as paying
cash to avoid tax, ‘padding’
insurance claims, selling faulty goods
and lying to obtain a child’s school
place and other ‘anti-civil’ practices
and criminal behaviours (Karstedt
and Farrall, 2007) do not regularly
feature in the pages of the popular
press or speeches made by
politicians. They are silent on the
‘scourge’ of middle-class criminality.
Academic criminology remains
quiet on middle-class criminality too
(with notable exceptions). Far more
familiar to students of criminology,
policy-makers and practitioners are
the right-realist accounts of Charles
Murray and the emphasis placed on
working-class ‘cultural’ explanations
of crime that revolve around
parenting practices, especially
among single-mothers, benefits
dependency and the ‘failures’ of
welfare (Murray, 1990). These
narratives find reflection in the
publications of Ian Duncan Smith’s
Centre for Social Justice, and were
mobilised in David Cameron’s
speeches on the ‘broken society’
before the 2010 general election.
The ‘problem’ of poor families
and communities are frequently
retold in the print and broadcast
media as wreaking havoc on those
directly affected, but also on wealth
and security of the ‘law-abiding
majority’. But ideas about the
‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’
and the trouble the latter create,
involving the ‘same principal actors,
subject to more or less the same
overall interpretation and implied
meaning’ (Flood, 2002), are deeply
rooted historically. They have,
however, been given renewed
currency in the wake of the
worldwide financial crisis in 2008
and, in particular, in the response of
governments to this crisis: the
justification for spending cuts. Media
coverage both follows and shapes
official discourses; exaggerated
stories and extreme examples used
by newspapers are often employed
uncritically in official
pronouncements to justify their
claims.
Justification for cuts
For one example among many, in
his justification for cuts to housing
benefit during his emergency budget
speech on 22 June 2010, George
Osborne (Chancellor) said: ‘today
there are some families receiving
£104,000 a year in housing benefit’.
A spokesperson for the Department
for Work and Pensions conceded
later that ‘we don’t have any figures
on how many people are claiming
that rate’. However, ‘a search of The
Daily Mail and The Sun newspaper
websites would throw up stories
of people being paid the same if
not more’ (Booth, 2010). There
were, of course, many challenges
to the use of extreme and false
examples to illustrate Osborne’s
rCJM No 83.indd 26 25/02/2011 07:43:15

case. The Telegraph’s (30 October
2010) investigation, involving 24
London boroughs, revealed just three
households claiming this amount,
but the idea that benefit claimants
are ‘takers’ not ‘contributors’,
‘problems’ rather than ‘victims’ and
‘others’ and not full citizens was
already deeply embedded.
We are not arguing that people
experiencing poverty do not commit
crimes; nor do we want to portray
the idea that working-class
communities should be especially
idolised or revered. We do, however,
wish to highlight that criminality
occurs and harm is perpetrated by
actors located throughout the social
structure. That working-class
communities are seen as generators
of so many contemporary social
problems, including crime and
anti-social behaviour, highlights the
importance of the authority and
pervasiveness of political and
popular messages about workingclass
family/community deficiencies
as well as their potential to be
mobilised in the pursuit of political
projects. This in turn informs
numerous and diverse policy
interventions including, currently,
cuts to welfare to reduce the UK’s
budget deficit.
Aspiration
Concerns that working-class people
lack aspiration, are lazy, drain
national resources and that the poor
lack the appropriate moral fibre to
lead a crime-free life are not confined
to the tabloid press but find their
reflection in fiction and film and
on the blogs and commentaries of
social networking sites. They are
pervasive. The BBC TV series Saints
and Scroungers (in 2009) is one
such programme which, as the title
suggests, is centred on the ‘deserving’
and ‘undeserving’ poor distinction.
Its web pages tell us: ‘Dominic
Littlewood follows fraud officers as
they bust the benefits thieves stealing
millions of pounds every year,
while charities and councils track
down people who actually deserve
government help’. We are reminded
that it is ‘us’ the taxpayers that are
being ‘robbed’ by ‘them’; we gain the
impression that the benefits system is
easy to defraud.
Saints and Scroungers focuses on
individuals who ‘merit’ help via the
welfare system and other TV
programmes such as Channel 4’s
Secret Millionaire highlight the plight
of the ‘deserving’ poor. Secret
Millionaire is concerned with groups
and causes thought worthy of
charitable donations from
millionaires who research their
potential beneficiaries covertly in
disadvantaged communities.
Although the morally dubious
practice of deceiving would-be
recipients about the donor’s true
identity might deserve some
discussion here, we wish to focus on
the ‘tutelage role’ that programmes
such as these play. ‘Tutoring’ takes
place in numerous ways, including
through policy programmes, forms of
expertise and through the state’s
influence on the mass media and
other ‘cultural systems’ (Hall et al.,
1978). The ways working-class
families and communities are
frequently portrayed in the mass
media can be read as part of an
educative process; the ‘normality’ of
middle-class lives and values are
contrasted with ‘dysfunctional’
working class ones; ‘backward
looking’ attitudes among the
poor are rendered shameful;
middle-class values associated
with self-improvement and
aspiration are revered. These
messages reflect and forge antiwelfarism
and justify other ‘special
measures’ towards these ‘problem
populations’.
In August 2010, The Sun ran the
headline that ‘Cam’s [David
Cameron’s] a £5bn Scambuster’.
Well informed commentators in the
broadsheets and on internet blogs
quickly pointed out that the £5bn
includes ‘fraud and error’:
administration errors, computer
systems and claimant error (e.g.
filling out the forms) and that, of total
benefits claimed, fraud represented a
tiny fraction of the welfare bill.
Fraudulently claimed benefits and
tax credits (combined) accounted for
£1.5bn. The Prime Minister’s
clampdown on benefit ‘fraud’
announced in The Sun’s article can
be read as political mythmaking; it
also demonstrates the functionality of
such myths.
Political myths are routinely and
vociferously challenged. There are
examples too numerous to mention
here of resistance to the way
working-class lives and communities
are portrayed in the media, as well as
mobilisation against government
proposals and policies and the
broader ideological framework in
which they nestle. Counter-messages
that protesters are behaving in a
manner that is unreasonable and
extreme are frequently mobilised
against such acts of resistance, but
these struggles nevertheless illustrate
not only that the poverty and crime
relationship is deeply contested but
that understandings around the
meaning and causes of poverty, like
definitions of crime and criminality,
reflect the operation of power. n
Lynn Hancock is Lecturer in Sociology at
the University of Liverpool. Gerry Mooney
is Senior Lecturer and staff tutor at the Open
University.
References
Booth, R. (2010), ‘Budget 2010: housing
benefit figures come under scrutiny’, The
Guardian, 23 June, www.guardian.co.uk/
uk/2010/jun/23/budget-housing-benefitfigures-scrutiny
(accessed 26 January
2011).
Flood, C. (2002), ‘Myth and ideology’, in
Schilbrack, K. (ed.), Thinking Through
Myths: Philosophical Perspectives,
London: Routledge.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke,
J. and Roberts, B. (1978), Policing the
Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and
Order, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Karstedt, S. and Farrall, S. (2007),
Law-abiding Majority? The Everyday
Crimes of the Middle-Classes, London:
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies,
www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/opus45/
Law_abiding_Majority_FINAL_VERSION.
pdf (accessed 26 January 2011).
Murray, C. (1990), The Emerging British
Underclass, London: IEA.
Smith, L., Allen, A. and Bowen, R.
(2010), ‘Expecting the worst: exploring
the associations between poverty and
misbehaviour’, Journal of Poverty, 14(1),
pp. 33-54.
Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (2010), ‘Crime,
harm and corporate power’, in Muncie,
J., Talbot D. and Walters, R. (eds.), Crime:
Local and Global, Cullompton: Willan/
Open University.
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m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
28
Understanding the
demonised generation
Brian McIntosh and Annabelle Phillips
challenge the view that young people are
responsible for society’s ills.
This article sets of out to
challenge the issue that sees
young people, as a generation,
defined primarily as a problem to
society. While acknowledging that a
minority of young people do engage
in deviant and criminal acts (often
persistently), this article argues,
through drawing upon empirical
research, that the majority of young
people do not fit this stereotype, both
in terms of offending behaviour but
also in how they currently contribute
to society. This article concludes by
pointing out that the current
coalition government have a major
opportunity – through both shifting
away from the more punitive vestiges
of New Labour’s law and order
agenda as well as
pushing the idea
of the ‘Big
Society’ – to take
the lead in
promoting a
much more
positive view of
young people by
recognising the
contribution,
rather than
focusing on the
problem, that this generation can,
and do, make to society.
Youth on the margins
Groups of young people cast in the
role of the archetypal societal folk
devil are neither a new or unique
phenomenon. As Geoff Pearson
(1980) noted in Hooligan: A History
of Respectable Fears, almost every
decade has seen concerns over
particular groups of youths, dating
back to knife gangs in the nineteenth
century. This point was echoed by
Newburn (2007) who has stated that
. . . almost every decade
has seen concerns over
particular groups of
youths, dating back
to knife gangs in the
nineteenth century.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550157
‘for at least the last century the key
representation of young people has
been to see them as a “problem” –
either as a source of difficulties, or
as being “at risk”’ (Newburn, 2007:
575). However, at the end of the
twentieth century it was argued that
the moral panic had evolved into
a more pervasive form from one
that focused on individual groups
of young people into a total panic
about young people as a whole
(Brown, 1998). Put simply, young
people, as a generation, were now
seen as being the problem, posing
a threat to the fabric of society. The
most contemporary example of
this shift towards total panic about
young people can be seen in the
way in which
New Labour’s
focus upon antisocial
behaviour
evolved into one
that came to be
seen in many
ways as a focus
upon anti-social
young people.
The introduction
of measures
such as dispersal
zones, curfews as well as giving
powers to local agencies to name
and shame perpetrators all pointed
to a disproportionate focus upon all
young people as being the anti-social
problem.
The following section explores
the roots and drivers of perceptions
of young people and also questions
how accurately such accounts
portray this population.
Perceptions of youth
The root of this general negativity
has several bases, with the role of the
media being a particularly powerful
driver. In particular, the media plays
an important role in cultivating
dominant perceptions of crime. We
know from research, for example,
that almost two-thirds of the
general public feel that crime rates
are rising informed by what they
see on television (60%) and 46%
from what they read in the papers.
Importantly, alongside friends’/
relatives’ experiences of crime
(89%), TV news and documentaries
(87%), local newspapers (77%) and
broadsheet newspapers (60%) are
all considered, in and of themselves,
to be trustworthy sources of crime
information (Duffy et al., 2008).
Such influence becomes particularly
problematic for young people
when certain media accounts,
especially newspapers, contain a
bias towards negative content. Ipsos
MORI research analysing media
content about young people found
that such stories tended not only
to be negatively skewed but also
that ‘in such stories, events are not
presented as tragic one offs, or as
news because they are unusual, but
as a cause for concern for society as
they signal underlying problems with
“today’s youth”’ (Ipsos MORI, 2006).
Research carried out on behalf of
Women in Journalism found similar
bias. This study found that, through
tracking media coverage of young
males over a 12 month period, over
half of stories written about this
group were related to crime as well
as finding that the most commonly
used terms associated with this group
were ‘yobs’ and ‘thugs’ (Echo, 2009).
Importantly, these perceptions are
far from benign. They influence both
attitudes and fears, and as such
provide a window of interpretation
through which judgements are made
of young people in general,
especially by those who have limited
or no direct contact with this
generation. Where such gaps exist
between image and contact, the
spectre of hooded youths hanging
around on street corners stimulates
anxiety, despite being commonplace.
The anticipated negative behaviour
of young people, whether this be
substantiated or not, is something
that genuinely worries members of
the general public. Research carried
rCJM No 83.indd 28 25/02/2011 07:43:16

Q. What would you say are the three most important issues facing Britain today when it
comes to crime?
40
Issues with a response of 10% or
more are presented
% important issue
Most important issues facing Britain
when it comes to crime
35
30
25
20
15
10
May- Aug- Nov- Feb- May- Aug- Sep- Oct- Nov- Dec- Jan- Feb- Mar- Apr- May- Jun- Aug- Nov-
07 07 07 08 08 08 08 08 08 08 09 09 09 09 09 09 09 09
Quarterly Monthly
Chart 1
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Base c.1,834 adults aged 16+ in England and Wales, May 07 – Nov 09
N F M M
1. Punishment/sentences
too lenient
=2. Too much knife crime
=2. Too much crime involving
young people
=2. Too much drug taking
5. Too much violent crime
6. Should be more police
7. Too much ASB
Source: Ipsos MORI
Most important issues facing your local
area when it comes to crime
Q. What would you say are the three most important issues facing your LOCAL AREA
today when it comes to crime?
Issues with a response of
35
10% or more are presented
% of respondents
Chart 2
Nov-08 Feb-09 March-09 May-09
Aug-09 Nov-09
Base c.1,834 adults aged 16+ in England and Wales, Nov 08 – Aug 09
1. Too much anti-social behaviour
2. Too many crimes involving young people
3. Too much drug taking
4. Burglary*
5. Should be more police
6. Too much alcohol related crime
* Responses are spontaneous with
interviewers using a pre-coded list to
record answers. Added to the pre-code
list for the first time in Aug ‘09, following
increased mentions in previous waves,
burglary is now the fourth most important
crime issue at the local level.
A majority think British teenagers need more
discipline
Young people today have too much freedom and not enough
discipline
% Strongly disagree % Tend to disagree % Tend to agree % Strongly agree
% Agree
15-29 72
30-49 85
50-64 91
65+ 92
AB 84
C1 87
C2 87
DE 81
Chart 3
35 40
40
43
40 44
17
4
14
2 9
1
1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2008 2009
Base: 2019 British adults aged 15+ 9 May – 5 June 2008
out by Ipsos MORI found that,
nationally, ‘too much crime involving
young people’ (17%) and ‘too much
knife crime’ (17%) were two key
concerns (see chart 1).
A similar picture also emerged in
terms of local issues where too much
anti-social behaviour (23%) and too
many crimes involving young people
(15%) were highlighted as issues (see
chart 2).
Beyond specific offences and
anti-social behaviour, further
research demonstrates that much of
the public do buy into the ‘youngpeople-as-a-problem’
viewpoint,
with many believing that this
population tend to have too much
freedom and not enough discipline.
Notably, this view becomes more
popular as people get older with
nine in ten of those aged 65 or over
agreeing with this statement (see
chart 3).
Young people: what’s the
problem?
However, while such negative
perceptions of young people exist
and persist, research also challenges
such views. Further research
conducted by Ipsos MORI – and
indeed by other organisations –
has shown that this is an unfair
picture of young people in Britain
today. Research conducted for the
Ipsos MORI 2009 Youth Survey,
undertaken on behalf of The Youth
Justice Board, provided data that
challenge the assumption that
young people, as a group, are
troublesome (Anderson et al., 2009).
The Youth Survey involved classroom
self-completion questionnaires
completed by 4,855 pupils aged
11-16 in mainstream education, as
well as 1,230 pupils of the same
age range from Pupil Referral Units
(PRU) (Anderson et al., 2010).
The key headline finding from
this study was the relatively low
amount of offending self-reported by
young people. Those in mainstream
education who reported that they
had committed an offence in the last
year amounted to just under one in
five (18%), which was significantly
lower than the 23% of pupils in
mainstream education who reported
doing so in 2008. However, this
figure was substantially higher for
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those pupils in referral units where
over one in six young people stated
that they had committed an offence
in the previous year (64%).
A similar distinction existed
between these
two groups of
young people in
relation to
individual offence
type, with those
in mainstream
education more
likely to have
committed less
serious forms of
offending. The
three most
common single
offences committed by those in
mainstream education were fare
dodging (49%), shoplifting (49%)
and damaging or destroying
someone else’s belongings (40%).
This compared to threatening/
assaulting other in public (64%),
damaging or destroying someone
else’s belongings (59%) and
shoplifting (57%) being the most
commonly committed by those in
PRUs.
These findings resonate with the
long known criminological fact that
a small number of young people
tend to commit a disproportionately
high number of offences. Yet as
argued above, the dominant negative
image of young people as deviants
and miscreants often overlooks such
differences within this group as a
population. In such circumstances,
more positive contributions to
society by young people tend to be
both overlooked and overshadowed.
However, once again, research
findings challenge such negative
stereotyping.
One area of society where young
people do make a positive
contribution is volunteering.
Research carried out by Ipsos MORI
on behalf of V, the national youth
volunteering charity, surveyed 1,997
young people aged 16-25 in England
found that two-thirds had carried out
some form of formal or informal
30
. . . young people do
want to get involved,
and as such, have
a strong contribution
to make to the ‘Big
Society’.
volunteering in the last year (68%)
(Pye et al., 2009). Furthermore, while
a quarter of young people were in
favour of a compulsory citizenship
programme (40%), over half
supported the
introduction of an
in-school
citizenship
programme
(54%).
Volunteering was
seen to appeal for
a mix of practical
and altruistic
reasons, with just
under one in six
stating that they
find the work
experience and training element of
volunteering appealing (57%), while
just under half were drawn by the
aspect of helping others (46%) (Pye
et al., 2009).
The above discussion, drawing
upon primary research findings,
paints a very different picture of
young people and one which
suggests that simply defining young
people as a demonised population is,
at the very least, simplistic if not
inaccurate.
Final thoughts: where now for
young people?
Since coming to power, the coalition
have been forthcoming in setting
out a new rhetoric around crime,
justice and anti-social behaviour that
focuses much more on rehabilitation
that previous approaches; the
impending abolition of the Anti-
Social Behaviour Order (ASBO)
being symptomatic of such a shift.
In addition, much as been made of
the ‘Big Society’ and encouraging
greater local voluntary involvement
by community residents. Research
presented above shows that young
people do want to get involved, and
as such, have a strong contribution to
make to the ‘Big Society’. However,
research findings also tell us that
presenting young people universally
as problematic is not without
consequence, especially in the
way they are seen by others. Taken
together, the shift towards a language
of rehabilitation, combined with
developing the Big Society provides
the coalition government with an
ideal opportunity to lead the way in
changing both the tone and volume
of how young people are thought of
in society. n
Brian McIntosh is a research executive and
member of the of the Crime and Justice
research team in the Social Research Institute
at Ipsos MORI. Annabelle Phillips is a
research director and head of Crime and
Justice Research in the Social Research Institute
at Ipsos MORI.
References
Anderson, F., Worsley, R., Nunney, F.,
Maybanks, N. and Dawes, W. (2010),
Ipsos MORI Youth Survey 2009, London:
Ipsos MORI.
Brown, S. (1998), Understanding Youth
and Crime: Listening to Youth?,
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Duffy, B., Wake, R., Burrows, T. and
Bremner, P. (2008), Closing the Gaps:
Crime and Public Perceptions, London:
Ipsos MORI, www.ipsos-mori.com/
DownloadPublication/11_sri_crime_
closing_the_gaps_012008.pdf (accessed
17 January 2011)
Echo (2009), Teenage Boys and the
Media, www.echoresearch.com/data/File/
pdf/WiJ%20%20charts%20Echo%20
Version.pdf (accessed 17 November
2010).
Ipsos MORI (2006), Young People and
the Media, Desk Research, London: Ipsos
MORI.
Newburn, T. (2007), ‘Youth crime and
youth culture’, in Maguire, M., Morgan,
R. and Reiner, R. (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of Criminology, 4th ed.,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pearson, G. (1983), Hooligan: A History
of Respectable Fears, Basingstoke:
MacMillan.
Pye, J., Lister, C., Latter, J. and Clements,
C. (2009), Young People Speak Out:
Attitudes to, and perceptions of, full-time
volunteering, London: Ipsos MORI, www.
ipsosmori.com/research publications/
publications/publication.
aspx?oItemId=1264. (accessed 17
January 2011)
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32
Policing myths
Megan O’Neill explores the myth that
bobbies on the beat cut crime.
It is ‘blindingly obvious’, The
Daily Mail declared last year, that
more ‘bobbies on the beat’ are
needed to address this country’s
‘serious problem with street crime’
(Utley, 2010). The latter dubiously
founded claim aside, the assumption
that the physical presence of a sworn
police officer in uniform, wandering
around urban streets, can have a
significant impact on crime (in terms
of prevention or detection) is not a
new concept. In the 1980s, the
Conservative government at the time
found a ready audience when their
‘tough on crime’ approach was
presented to the public. A key aspect
of this was better pay for police and
more of them. The subsequent
Labour government also helped itself
to power by presenting a ‘tough’
stance on crime, which included
increasing police
numbers. The
recent
comprehensive
spending review
is the first time in
a very long while
that the sitting
government has
made a reduction
in police
numbers a strong
possibility. Since
that suggestion
was made, many
have been
predicting a rise in crime, chaos on
the streets and all manner of
apocalyptic events to befall our
beloved land. Now, let’s all just calm
down for a minute and think about
this, shall we?
True, since the mid 1990s, the
overall crime rate has been falling.
And also true is that during the same
period, police numbers have been
rising in the UK. However, can we
be sure that the two are connected?
David Hanson, former minister for
crime, policing and ounterterrorism,
. . . the assumption that
the physical presence
of a sworn police officer
in uniform, wandering
around urban streets,
can have a significant
impact on crime is not a
new concept.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550158
certainly was (Hanson, 2010).
Granted, he was also trying to keep
his political party in power by using
a mantra that has been very
successful for this purpose in the
past. However, academic research
doesn’t support such an assumption
and as every good scientist (social or
natural) knows, correlation does not
equal causation. Crime has been
falling during this time in many
countries around the world, even in
those where police numbers fell.
There is no empirical link between
the two events.
Social norms
Academic researchers on the police
have argued for many years that the
police, on their own, cannot reduce
the crime rate (Wright, 2002).
Crime is caused by a wide variety of
variables which
no single public
body could
ever assume to
control, especially
on its own.
Our society’s
organisation,
regulation and
stability are based
on a number of
institutions, social
norms, policy
choices as well
as global events.
To assume that
putting uniformed officers ‘on the
streets’ would override all these
other factors is just not logical,
Jim. We just have to look at any
developing, or re-developing, nation
in places like Africa or the Middle
East to see that just putting police on
the streets doesn’t suddenly make
everything better.
Achieving social stability and a
low crime rate takes the
commitment of a wide variety of
sectors, services and actors. The
police on their own cannot change a
person’s upbringing, education,
income, mental health and level of
drug dependency (which are for
more pertinent factors in one’s risk
of becoming involved in street
crime). In fact, if our local police
service decides to have a sudden
‘crack down’ on perceived local
crime problem, resulting in a
dramatic increase in arrests, this will
actually lead to a short term rise in
the recorded crime rate as these
arrests are processed through the
system. This is not to say that the
police are unimportant in terms of
crime control. They are of course a
very important element in this; but
one element among many.
So why do we still plead, year
after year, for more police? Well, one
thing that ‘bobbies on the beat’ can
do is to make people feel better.
Some people (although not all, by
any means – just ask any low
income area that already feels over
policed and under protected – feel
reassured knowing that there is a
local police team at hand, which
specialises in their geographic area,
and which sends out accessible foot
patrols from time to time.
It is comforting to know that
since 2008, all ‘neighbourhoods’ in
England and Wales have had their
own group of Dixons of Dock Green
assigned to them (Home Office,
2004). Each Neighbourhood
Policing Team is comprised not only
of police officers, but also Police
Community Support Officers
(PCSOs), special constables and
members of the local authority.
These teams focus on activities in
their assigned geographical area and
do not get involved in emergency
response calls to other areas (unless
it is an extreme situation). Some
have argued that PCSOs are just
‘plastic police’, and that they can’t
really do anything effective because
they do not have the same powers as
the sworn police. While it is true that
PCSOs don’t have police powers,
this actually makes it easier for them
to be ‘on the beat’, providing that
visible reassurance of a person in
uniform. If they did have police
powers, they would be in the office
far more, doing the necessary
paperwork (rightly) involved when
an officer arrests a person and thus
rCJM No 83.indd 32 25/02/2011 07:43:18

takes his or her liberty away. PCSOs
can be the ‘bobbies on the beat’ that
our sworn officers never can be,
and, as has been reported to me in
my ongoing research (funded by the
British Academy), are actually quite
effective in this.
The Neighbourhood Policing
Programme was based on the ‘signal
crimes’ perspective. The basic
theory is that there are certain
criminal or anti-social events that
increase a person’s fear of crime,
regardless of whether there is an
actual heightened risk of
vicitimisation. These ‘signal crimes’
are specific to the person or the area
in question, and thus cannot be
generalised to the wider population.
They may not even lead to further
crimes (as in the ‘Broken Windows
theory’). The main point is that
certain perceived crimes lead
certain people to feel worried about
crime, and may also bring them to
change their behaviour to avoid
becoming victimised (Innes, 2005).
The ‘signal crimes’ perspective was
the philosophical basis for
‘Reassurance Policing’, which later
became Neighbourhood Policing.
Reassurance Policing was trialed in
a few areas in England and Wales
before being introduced to the rest
of the country. An interesting and
important element of Reassurance
Policing was that it was designed to
do just that – reassure members of
the public – by having dedicated
local policing teams addressing
their specific concerns. It was not
designed to reduce crime. If that
happened indirectly as a result of
new local
initiatives, great!
However, the
main idea was to
improve
confidence in the
police, feelings of
safety in
neighbourhoods and thus create
happier neighbours. It was only
when the programme was rolled out
to all policing areas in England and
Wales that the crime reduction
element was added (and the name
changed).
Whether or not it has been a
success in terms of crime reduction
is not really of issue here. What I
. . . putting police on the
streets doesn’t suddenly
make everything better.
wish to point out is that foot patrols
by uniformed PCSOs is a key
element of Neighbourhood Policing.
Do we really need a fully paid, fully
trained police officer with the power
of arrest to walk around, making
people feel better? Is that really a
good use of tax payer money and
police time? PCSOs can do, and are
doing, this very important job;
freeing up the sworn officers to do
what they are specially trained to do.
My experience of Neighbourhood
Policing teams is that they do work
as teams, and any important
information
which PCSOs
gather on their
time in the
community is
passed directly on
to their police
officer colleagues.
We do have ‘bobbies on the beat’
these days, albeit a twenty-first
century version of them. I would
suggest that if anyone wishes to get
upset and panic about the funding
cuts to police services because they
want ‘bobbies on the beat’, that they
do so in relation to the potential loss
of PCSOs, not police officers. Fewer
police officers alone will not lead to
a sudden and chaos-inducing rise in
crime. Sorry if I disappointed you. n
Dr Megan O’Neill is Senior Lecturer in
Criminology at the University of Salford.
References
Hanson, D. (2010), ‘More bobbies on
the beat do help to cut crime’, letter to
The Guardian, 18 February,
www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/18/
police-numbers-crime-figures-uk
(accessed 17 January 2011)
Home Office (2004), Building
Communities, Beating Crime, London:
HMSO, www.archive2.officialdocuments.co.uk/document/
cm63/6360/6360.pdf
Innes, M. (2005), ‘Why “soft” policing is
hard: on the curious development of
reassurance policing, how it became
neighbourhood policing and what this
signifies about the politics of police
reform’, Journal of Community & Applied
Social Psychology, 15, pp. 156-169.
Utley, T. (2010), ‘More bobbies on the
beat? Forgive me for being silly but isn’t
that blindingly obvious to everyone
except our politicians’, The Daily Mail, 24
September, www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/
article-1314755/More-bobbies-beat-Isntblindingly-obvious-everyone.html
Wright, A. (2002), Policing: An
Introduction to Concepts and Practice,
Devon: Willan Publishing.
cjm no. 83 March 2011 33
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Photo courtesy of Melinda Kerrison
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34
The ‘alternative to
custody’ myth
Helen Mills questions claims that community
sentences cut prison numbers.
The term ‘alternative to custody’
has been a mainstay in thinking
about criminal justice since at
least the 1970s when it gained
prominence in the growing
decarceration movement of the time
(see McMahon, 1992). Since then,
providing better ‘alternatives to
custody’ was a key stated intention
of Labour’s criminal justice reforms,
an ambition the coalition
government looks set to continue
(Wintour, 2010). At the same time,
demanding
‘alternatives to
custody’ has been
prominent in
many penal
reform
organisations’
campaigns. In this
article I want to
challenge some of
the common
sense assumptions about ‘alternatives
to custody’ and suggest it is a myth
that community sentence reforms
undertaken with the stated aim of
offering an alternative to custody will
necessarily achieve any fundamental
reduction in the prison population.
Perhaps part of the reason for the
popularity of the term ‘alternative to
custody’ comes from its ambiguous
application. It is a phrase that means
very different things to different
people. There are three positions
about changing criminal justice
where ‘alternative to custody’ has
been used over the last decade, by
those seeking to:
• Extend the principles of prison
to the community. The desire to
make, or to convince the public
that, community sentences are
more ‘prison-like’ in terms of how
punitive and onerous they are.
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550159
Community sentence
reform does not offer
an effective solution to
the record high prison
population.
• Divert some people from
custody. Particularly those on
short-term custodial sentences.
• Decarcerate. To make the case
that the current use of prison
is always a choice, not a fixed
certainty, and that community
based interventions can reduce
the use of custody.
As should be clear, the distinction
between these definitions is not
mere semantics. Rather, ‘alternative
to custody’ is
a deceptively
simple term
which is in fact
used to describe
very different
phenomenon.
As such what
is intended by
proponents of
‘alternatives to
custody’ is not immediately obvious
and can be easily misunderstood.
The former Labour government
was a prolific user of the term
‘alternative to custody’ to describe
the intended impact of community
sentence reform on reducing shortterm
custody. The use of short-term
custody was considered undesirably
high and various attempts were made
to improve the use of community
sentences as a diversion. Lord Bach,
the former Parliamentary Under-
Secretary of State for the Ministry
of Justice, summarises Labour’s
approach, clearly articulating that
making community sentences ‘tough’
and promoting this to the public and
sentencers were key elements of
reform:
[The Labour government] have
ensured that the courts can use
tough community punishments in
place of short custodial sentences
where doing so is justified and
proportionate ... Within this
broader approach to the
promotion of community
sentences, we are doing some
important focused work on seven
intensive alternatives to custody
pilot projects currently under way
around the country. They are
targeted at offenders who would
otherwise receive short custodial
sentences ... The projects, which
are being evaluated, have
engaged with the courts to build
sentencer confidence in intensive
community orders as a robust,
demanding and effective
alternative to short-term custody.
(in Hansard Lords debates, 22
February 2010, cGC215,
emphasis added)
The calls for tough community
sentences and building sentencers’
and the public’s confidence in
non-custodial interventions have
been continued by the coalition
(see Herbert, 2010). These proposals
have enjoyed broad support from the
penal reform sector, many of whom
see community sentence reform as
a common sense way to address the
record demands being placed on
prisons. Here are three reasons why
this optimism about the capacity
of community sentence reform to
tackle the use of custody may be
misplaced.
1. The overall size of the prison
population is left reasonably
untouched by community sentence
reforms.
Changing the use of short-term
custody is undoubtedly a valid
ambition to want to achieve in its
own right. But the desire to reduce
short-term custody is not one and the
same as the intention to tackle the
overall use of prison as an institution.
The nature of short-term custody is
such that whilst it accounts for the
majority of prison receptions,
sentences of under 12 months
constitute less than 10 per cent of the
83,000 people in prison. To achieve
a reduction in the overall prison
population by cutting short-term
custody requires a disproportional
change to occur. For example,
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community sentences would have to
replace 40 per cent of all custodial
sentences of less than 12 months to
achieve the Ministry of Justice’s
intended 3,000 reduction in the
overall prison population by
2014/2015 (Herbert, 2010). This
would be no less than a sea change
in the use of short-term custody but a
change that would not significantly
undermine plans to extend the
capacity of the prison estate.
2. Replacing a proportion of short
term custodial sentences with
community sentences will not
necessarily produce substantial
financial savings to invest in
alternatives.
An economic case has been
central to the promotion of
community sentences by penal
reformers. Much emphasis has been
placed on making the case that
community sentences are more
attractive than prison on cost
grounds. Whatever the other merits
of community sentences, and leaving
aside reservations about elevating
cost in debates about the nature of a
justice system we want over other
concerns such as fairness or justice,
there are two flaws in the economic
case for alternatives to custody.
The first is simply that there is not
an adequately sophisticated
evidence base to enable meaningful
cost comparison between sentences.
The National Offender Management
Service and the National Audit
Office have both acknowledged that
the paucity of detailed cost
information about criminal justice
sanctions inhibits the extent to which
well informed conclusions about
expenditure can be made (see Mills
et al., 2010).
Secondly, to get a significant
amount of money out of prison
requires a reduction in required
prison capacity. Closing down a
prison, mothballing prison wings,
halting future prison building plans
would be moves that would seriously
and immediately dent prison
expenditure. As a change aimed at a
proportion of population in shortterm
custody, it is reasonable to
conclude that ‘alternatives to
custody’ cannot bring about change
on the scale necessary to release
meaningful sums of money from
prison.
3. Sentences introduced as explicit
alternatives to custody have failed to
act as like-for-like replacements of
prison sentences.
The Criminal Justice Act 2003 has
been the most far reaching
community sentence reform in this
period. Implemented in 2005, the
Act restructured community
sentences into one community order
with 12 requirements and introduced
the suspended sentence order, a
sentence aimed at those who had
crossed the custody threshold, but
who could serve a custodial sentence
in the community. A key stated
intention of these reforms was to
provide credible community
alternatives to custodial sentences of
less than 12 months.
Four years on from their
implementation, the courts handed
down suspended sentence orders for
10 per cent of all indictable offences.
This far outstrips the Home Office’s
predictions for the sentence (in Mair
et al., 2007). To precisely assess the
impact of these reforms on the
courts’ use of custody is impossible.
There are no statistics that distinguish
the community-based sanctions
given by sentencers instead of
custody and the community
sentences given to people who
would not have received custody
anyway. However, all indications
suggest these reforms have not had
the desired overall effect of reducing
the use of short-term custody. Courts’
proportional use of custody for
indictable offences is precisely
unchanged in 2009 from that which
it was before the community
sentence reforms were introduced in
2004 (see Figure 1). Figure 2
demonstrates that the rate of shortterm
custody for indictable offences
for this same period has reduced by
1 per cent.
This combination of the high use
of the suspended sentence order, and
the smaller reduction in short-term
custody than in the reductions in
Figure 1: Sentencing outcomes for indictable offences pre- and postcommunity
sentence reforms (%)
% given 2004 2009
Immediate custody 25 25
Suspended sentence 1 10
Community sentences 35 33
Fines 21 17
Other disposals 18 16
Figure 2: Indictable offences sentences to short term custody (%)
cjm no. 83 March 2011 35
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m Y T H S A N D C R I m I N A L J u S T I C E
lower tariff sentences (community
sentences, fines and other disposals)
suggests that, rather than significantly
impact courts’ use of prison,
‘alternatives to custody’ reforms have
been more effective at displacing
other non-custodial sentences.
What’s more, the reforms have
resulted in some people who would
have previously received a lower
tariff disposal of a community order,
fine or other discharge, receiving a
suspended sentence order, a higher
tariff and more onerous intervention.
The precise intentions of
community sentence reform are
difficult to unpick and may be
pursued primarily for reasons other
than the potential effect on the use of
custody. For example, to improve
public confidence in criminal justice,
to reduce criminal justice costs, or to
try to improve criminal justice
effectiveness. But it is clear that
36
reforming and introducing new
community sanctions under the guise
this will impact on the size of the
prison population is a
misapprehension. Community
sentence reform does not offer an
effective solution to the record high
prison population nor will it address
the overall scale and scope of the
current demands placed on the
criminal justice system. Those
concerned with identifying credible,
long-term strategies for addressing
the use of prison and criminal justice
will not find answers working only
within the limited confines of the
‘alternatives to custody’ debate. n
Helen Mills is a Research Associate at the
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and
project lead on the ‘Reform Sector Strategies’
project funded by the Esmée Fairbairn
Foundation. A briefing on the alternatives to
custody debate will be launched in April
2011.
References
Herbert, N. (2010), Speech on
Government Plans for Prison Reform,
www.justice.gov.uk/news/sp221010a.
htm (accessed 12 December 2010).
Hansard Lords debates (2010), Prison
Howard League Commission, 22 February.
Mair, G., Cross, N. and Taylor, S. (2007),
The Use and Impact of the Community
Order and the Suspended Sentence
Order, London: Centre for Crime and
Justice Studies.
McMahon, M. (1992), The Persistent
Prison? Rethinking Decarceration and
Penal Reform, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Mills, H., Silvestri, A., Grimshaw, R. with
Silberhorn-Armantrading, F. (2010),
Prison and Probation Expenditure, 1999
– 2009, London: Centre for Crime and
Justice Studies.
Wintour, P. (2010), ‘Ken Clarke plans
tough changes to community service –
run privately’, The Guardian, 26
November.
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Should prisoners work 9 to 5?
Joe Black, Mark Day, Steve Gillan and Gemma Lousley offer their
views on plans to implement a 40-hour working week with minimum
wages for prisoners.
Joe Black: A naive, ill thought out, divisive and ultimately unobtainable
fantasy.
Proper meaningful jobs as opposed to menial, lowskilled
and repetitive contract and administrative
services work; jobs for everyone instead of a measly
third of the prison population; being paid the minimum
wage, nearly the same rate per hour as the average
prisoner’s weekly wage; and a decent savings pot for
post-release use to supplement a pathetic discharge
grant that hasn’t changed since 1995. What’s not to
like? It certainly went down well at the Conservative
Party Conference, or at least Ken Clarke’s claim that
he would ‘make prisons tougher places of hard work
… [and] instill in our jails, a regime of hard work’.
But here’s the rub: whilst it may have gained Clarke a
temporary respite and appears to hold the potential to
save his cash-strapped department some much needed
money, closer scrutiny clearly reveals the plan for what
it is: a naive, ill thought out, divisive and ultimately
unobtainable fantasy.
Leaving aside the myriad of potentially
insurmountable practical problems that should be
obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of the
prison estate (such as the clash between current prison
officers’ shift patterns and a 40-hour working week, the
massive increase in their numbers that would be needed
to facilitate such a scheme, the lack of suitable
workshop spaces across the estate, etc.), there is a
whole raft of powerful arguments against the
introduction of a scheme that gives the impression of
having been sketched out on the back of a fag packet
(Pall Mall, of course).
For example, this scheme is only ever likely to
involve lifers, the sort of stable long-term population
that any prospective company would ideally want to
use (c.f. the use of US maximum security prisons as sites
for call centres). This would further exacerbate the
existing jobs disparity between local prisons (where
they are few and far between) and the rest of the estate,
as well as introducing divisions within individual
prisons between those who are able to secure a
Joe Black is secretary at Campaign Against Prison Slavery
cjm no. 83 March 2011
10.1080/09627251.2011.550160
minimum wage job and those stuck without one, doing
either contract and administrative services work or
having none at all, as the Prison Service will certainly
not be paying prisoners doing its cleaning, laundry and
kitchen work the minimum wage. Sick, disabled and
aged prisoners would also inevitably be discriminated
against too.
Moreover, what will happen to the role of education
within prisons? Given the choice between £5.93 an
hour for work and attending an hour’s education for
30p, we all know which will prove the most popular.
Also, given the widely quoted statistics on the poor
literacy and numeracy of prisoners, how is the Prison
Service going to encourage the sort of improvements
needed in both before prospective companies will be
willing to take on HMPS’ captive workforce? Or does
Clarke expect these firms to pay for the necessary
education of prisons as well as the building of the
workshops (on-the-cheap privatisation?) that will be
needed, as the Ministry of Justice almost certainly did
not include any funding for this in the recently halved
prisons building and maintenance programme fund?
Then there is the ‘no taxation without representation’
argument: following recent European Court of Human
Rights ruling on the implementation of the Hirst vs. UK
(No. 2) decision, as long-term prisoners are also the
very group that Ministers want to prevent from ever
having the vote. Add to this the notion of postsentencing
fines, deductions of wages to go to ‘victims’
groups, even where a prisoner has committed a
‘victimless crime’, when there already exists provisions
for judges to impose compensation orders at trial; not to
mention the idea of a post-release bond against further
good behaviour – pre-crime fines anyone? No, this
vision of a neo-Victorian rehabilitation regime
established through compulsory hard work and a
victim’s compensation tax amounts to a modern form of
debt bondage and is a total non-starter in the opinion of
the Campaign Against Prison Slavery. n
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
rCJM No 83.indd 37 25/02/2011 07:43:20
37
D E b A T I N g

D E b A T I N g
Mark Day: There is real scope for taking responsibility even behind bars
The coalition government’s plan for getting more
prisoners to work is, in principle, absolutely right. We
know that prisoners who do gain skills for work in
prison and are released with a job to go to are far less
likely to reoffend than people who go out homeless and
jobless. According to a survey by the Ministry of Justice,
prisoners who have problems with both employment and
accommodation on release from prison had a reoffending
rate of 74 per cent during the year after custody,
compared to 43 per cent for those with no problems.
Providing work opportunities for prisoners and
equipping them with skills for life on release should be
central to the rehabilitative work of prisons; but is too
often a neglected area. As the Justice Secretary Ken
Clarke has highlighted, many people in prison are
compelled to live a life of ‘enforced, bored idleness’.
Currently, under a third of the prison population is
engaged in work activities at any one time, mostly in
low grade and menial tasks. Between 2007/2008 and
2009/2010 the average hours per prisoner per week
spent in work decreased from 12.6 to 11.8 hours.
Placing work at the heart of the prison regime, as the
justice green paper proposes, could play an important
part in the coalition’s plans for a ‘rehabilitation
revolution’. It will be essential that employment options
are meaningful and linked to opportunities for work on
release. Clarke has stated that: ‘We would need to ensure
that, wherever possible, the hours spent in productive
employment by prisoners reintroduced to the work habit
were similar to those to which they would have to adapt
if they obtained a job when they left prison.’
Companies such as Cisco, Travis Perkins and
Network Rail already provide work places in prisons.
The government will need to engage with employers
and encourage them to follow their lead. It will also
need to support companies in the recruitment and
retention of ex-offenders. Reforming the outdated
Mark Day is Head of Policy and Communications at the Prison Reform Trust.
38
Rehabilitation of Offenders Act will be essential to
dismantling some of the barriers that prevent former
offenders from gaining employment.
Proposals for prisoners to contribute part of the
money they earn into a victims’ fund make sense.
Earnings will need to be sufficient to enable prisoners to
pay into the fund, as well to contribute to their upkeep
in prison, support families on the outside and save for
resettlement. Employers should provide work at the
national minimum wage so as to prevent exploitation
and not to undercut local labour costs.
Provision will need to be made for older and
disabled prisoners to enable them to work. Where this is
not possible, arrangements for alternative meaningful
activities will need to be in place. Opportunities for
volunteering, for instance through Samaritan Listeners
schemes, peer mentoring and prisoners’ councils,
should be extended alongside increasing the availability
of work places. There is real scope for taking
responsibility even behind bars.
The government can learn from one scheme that is
already doing pioneering work in employing prisoners
and former offenders. National Grid leads a partnership
of over 80 companies engaged in the Young Offenders
Programme, which offers training to young people in
prison with the prospect of a job on release.
Over 1,500 offenders have now gone through the
Young Offender Programme. The re-offending rate is
only 7 per cent, compared with the national average of
over 70 per cent. According to the National Grid
website: ‘As well as providing motivated, skilled gas
network operatives, the programme is delivering
shareholder value and increasing the positive
perceptions of many stakeholders.’
Making prisons places of meaningful, purposeful
activity would mean prisoners serving time rather than
wasting time. n
Steve Gillan: There is the moral aspect of private firms laying off a
workforce and then taking on prisoners for minimum wage
Kenneth Clarke announced at the Conservative Party
Conference that he wanted prisoners working a 40hour
week in prisons in England and Wales. It has been
intimated that they should be paid minimum wages and
some of that wage should be given to victims.
In an ideal world I can understand why Mr Clarke
would want this and why it might appeal to the British
public rather than seeing prisoners playing pool, darts or
cards.
However, it is not that simple; a Yes/No debate is
extremely difficult. For a start the prospect of prisoners
working a 40-hour week cannot be matched by prison
staff presently working an average of 39 hours.
It would also be riddled with problems such as being
compliant with health and safety regulations, taxation
and the Inland Revenue. There is the moral aspect of
private firms laying off a workforce and then taking on
prisoners for minimum wage. Space would also be a
problem. Very few prisons have the space to have
factories or warehouses.
Many jobs for prisoners exist in prisons, for example,
cleaners, orderlies and kitchen workers: would they also
be entitled to minimum wage? If so, where does that
extra finance come from at a time when the coalition
government is dramatically reducing spending in the
Ministry of Justice?
This is nothing new; announcements like this have
been made in the past by Michael Howard. They did not
rCJM No 83.indd 38 25/02/2011 07:43:20

work in the early 1990s and they will not work now.
However, I am not going to rubbish the view of Kenneth
Clarke in respect of this. The Prison Officers Association
will produce more on this during the consultation of the
green paper titled Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation
and Sentencing of Offenders. This consultation ends on
the 4 March 2011 and contained within the consultation
is the issue appertaining to prisoners working.
My initial thoughts are it is ambitious; there are
problems as I have identified. Rather than focussing on
work, perhaps the focus should be more on training and
education to ensure that offenders are given the skills so
that they are employable when they leave prison.
Consequently, perhaps they will be able to hold a full
time job on release rather than assisting private
companies to make profits from paying minimum wage
whilst these prisoners are in prison.
Steve Gillan is general secretary of the Prison Officers Association.
There is not enough detail for me to support the
views of Kenneth Clarke at this time in respect of this
initiative so I would have to err on the side of caution
and state I am not in favour of prisoners working a
40-hour week.
However I am in favour of rehabilitation of offenders
and protecting the general public from crime and the
effects of criminality. The POA have been clear that we
will support any government to reduce crime but until
the real issues such as alcohol abuse, drug abuse,
mental illness, social exclusion and education are
tackled then politicians of all parties are not effectively
dealing with the problems. Dealing effectively with
these issues will see our prison population fall and
perhaps there will be no need to debate whether
prisoners should be working whilst incarcerated. n
Gemma Lousley: If prisons remain overcrowded, how will there be
enough staff to supervise prisoners working a 40-hour week?
There is, overall, a lot to recommend prisoners doing
proper work for proper wages. Prisoners would get the
opportunity to use their time constructively, developing
skills and acquiring experience of real value in the
outside world. They would also be able to save money
for their release and give some of their earnings to their
families. Deductions from prisoners’ earnings would be
paid into a victims’ fund, so that those affected by crime
could receive financial reparation. Communities, too,
could feel positive effects; if prisoners work during their
sentences, post-release employment may become a
more achievable goal – and we know that employment
plays a significant role in reducing reoffending.
The devil, however, is in the detail, and the
government will need to address a number of issues if
the plan is to bring the benefits it promises. For instance,
a recent report by UNLOCK and the Prison Reform Trust
has drawn attention to the obstacles prisoners face
opening bank accounts: without access to these, how
are they to be paid, and to save money for when they’re
released? On an even more fundamental level, at a time
of spending cuts and job losses, where will the work
come from?
There has also been little indication of what sort of
work prisoners could be doing. If the opportunities
available are limited to the repetitive, monotonous
labour that often characterises work in prison – it was
revealed in The Guardian last year that prisoners were
cleaning and repackaging in-flight headsets for airlines
and assembling empty patient case note folders for the
NHS – prisoners are unlikely to develop skills that will
enhance their job prospects for the future. Some
excellent work schemes, have, however, been set up,
which demonstrate real aspirations for those on them.
These should be used as models if the government
wants prison work to effect positive change.
Gemma Lousley is policy and campaigns officer, Criminal Justice Alliance.
Allowing prisoners to work not only in prisons but
also in the community, and encouraging employers to
offer job opportunities post-release, should be at the
heart of the plan – both are vital to successful
resettlement. The government also needs to look beyond
the minimum wage: prisoners should be paid the going
rate for the type of work they are doing. This would
increase the amount of money available to victims and
prisoners’ families, ensure that local workers and
industries are not undercut, and mean that prisoners are
not exploited.
An emphasis on work in prisons should also not
come at the expense of services such as education and
drug and alcohol treatment. There are high levels of
illiteracy and innumeracy among the prison population,
and addressing basic skills needs is a crucial part of
rehabilitation. A high proportion of prisoners also have
drug and alcohol dependencies: for these, appropriate
treatment programmes must be the priority. Prisoners
are individuals, and each has a different set of needs.
The use of prisoners’ time, and the allocation of money
within the prison estate, need to reflect this.
Finally, if the scheme is to be implemented, the
problem of the prison population needs to be
addressed. If prisons remain overcrowded, how will
there be enough staff to supervise prisoners working a
40-hour week and provide support to employers,
particularly when the Prison Service is facing a
substantial reduction in frontline staff? How will prisons
find the space for large numbers of prisoners to work
full time? And what about the effect of prison ‘churn’
– how can prisoners develop skills and experience
through meaningful work if they are frequently moved
from one prison to another? If the government truly
wants work in prisons to be a success, it must first
reduce the prison population. n
cjm no. 83 March 2011 39
rCJM No 83.indd 39 25/02/2011 07:43:20
D E b A T I N g

R E v I E W
40
Reflections on
international youth
justice: a personal view
Rod Morgan is shocked by the imagery at a
recent youth justice conference.
When it comes to youth justice,
my emotions often run high,
particularly when the impact on
individuals is clear. I sometimes
come home shaken from
interviewing children in custody.
Tears tend to well up when I’m
watching a wonderful performance,
dance or music for example, by
kids who’ve been in trouble and
whose faces also betray some of the
wear and tear they’ve borne in their
short lives. So, when attending the
fourth International Juvenile Justice
Observatory conference in Rome at
the beginning of November 2010,
I made sure that I went to two
photographic film shows run during
the lunch breaks.
The second show, a montage of short
film clips, interview material and
photographic portraits of youths in
custody or attending drug centres
in Chile, made a discernible impact
on the audience. As the chairman
for the subsequent session, the
director of the Miami-Dade County,
Florida Juvenile Service Department,
observed, most of us had been
stunned by what we had watched.
The photographer, Olivio Argenti,
told us that the majority of the young
subjects of his black and white
portraits with which his show ended
were already dead, from murder,
suicide or AIDs. Their intrinsically
beautiful faces were ravaged by
knife scars, drug addiction or AIDShastened
missing teeth. Many had
hard, wary eyes out of which no trust
shone.
But I was more affected by the
show the previous day to which no
©2011 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
10.1080/09627251.2011.550164
conference chairman subsequently
made reference. Lizzie Sadin, a
French photographer, showed black
and white stills taken in youth
prisons in several countries. Her
sequence concluded with about a
dozen shots of black youths
imprisoned in a Texas boot camp.
These images shocked me much
more than the overcrowded, African
dormitories we’d seen earlier. Indeed
they built within me an anger that I
could not shake off when I went to
the final conference session about
‘evidence-based youth justice
practice in the US’.
Black youth cringe
We saw black youths on their knees
in prison yards dressed in fatigues,
bent forward, heads down, with
wrist, waist and ankle chains. We
saw rows of black kids doing push
ups, the pain and strain of their
effort contorting their facial muscles
while overweight, brutish, sheriffs
bent over them, bellowing orders,
their night sticks drawn. We saw
a black youth cringing while two
sheriffs, Stetson hatted, lips parted,
their noses only two or three inches
from his face, screamed abuse or
instructions at him. It was horrific.
Truly shocking. As bad as any of
the images from Guantánamo Bay.
The worst form of child abuse. More
appalling than the poverty stricken
African dormitories because this
was deliberate, concerted,
bureaucratically organised, chillingly
engineered in the wealthiest, most
powerful country on earth. This was
embedding hate in Good Ole Texas.
None of the American presenters
said a thing. Except, explicitly or by
implication. Boot camps don’t work:
it’s ‘not evidence based practice’.
And it’s expensive: incarcerating kids
is. And we have a fiscal crisis.
The American presenters were
good guys. They described and
explained a commendable direction
of policy travel in the jurisdictions for
which they were responsible:
juvenile arrests, down; juvenile
detention population, down;
reconviction rates, down; delivery of
evidence-based intervention
programmes, up: aggregate youth
justice service costs, down. And,
collectively, we Europeans
applauded. This was North America
showing the way.
But underneath I seethed. For 30,
40, 50 years the USA has been
operating a penal policy as if on
Mars. And now that the Americans
show signs of coming down to earth
we applaud as if all the lessons we
have to learn come again from across
the Pond. But at the conference in
Rome most of the countries listening
to the US team have incarceration
rates a fifth or a tenth of that in the
USA. These European countries
never did criminalise and incarcerate
on the North American scale. They
maintained a sense of positive
mutuality. No wonder some of the
data emerging from the American
evidence-based programmes are
looking good. The policies are being
applied in a context that was always
crazy, and substantially remains so.
Let’s put North American policy in
proper context. And in the UK let’s
start taking lessons not from across
the Pond, but from across the
Channel. In Maryland where Donald
DeVore, the longstanding secretary
for the Department of Juvenile
Services, reported such terrific
progress, they still have 1,900
juveniles in custody in a state with a
total population of a mere 5.3
million. Do some calculations and
reflect on that.
I’m feeling better now that I’ve
written this. n
Rod Morgan is Visiting Professor at the
University Police Science Institute, Cardiff and
former chair of the Youth Justice Board.
rCJM No 83.indd 40 25/02/2011 07:43:21

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