Power, Conflict and Criminalisation

Phil Scraton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415422413
• eBook ISBN: 9781134101115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on a body of empirical, qualitative work spanning three decades, this unique text traces the significance of critical social research and critical analyses in understanding some of the most significant and controversial issues in contemporary society. Focusing on central debates in the UK and Ireland – prison protests; inner-city uprisings; deaths in custody; women's imprisonment; transition in the north of Ireland; the 'crisis' in childhood; the Hillsborough and Dunblane tragedies; and the 'war on terror' – Phil Scraton argues that 'marginalisation' and 'criminalisation' are social forces central to the application of state power and authority. Each case study demonstrates how structural relations of power, authority and legitimacy, establish the determining contexts of everyday life, social interaction and individual opportunity.

This book explores the politics and ethics of critical social research, making a persuasive case for the application of critical theory to analysing the rule of law, its enforcement and the administration of criminal justice. It is indispensable for students in the fields of criminology, criminal justice and socio-legal studies, social policy and social work.

1
Challenging academic orthodoxy, recognising and proclaiming ‘values’ in critical social research

On ‘knowing’

Your clever academics befriend us for a few months, they come down to our site, eats our food and drinks our tea. Some of them even lives amongst us. Then they disappear to their nice homes and university libraries. Next thing we know they’re giving lectures on us, writing books about us … what do they know about our struggles? How can they know our pain? We live it all the time. Our persecution lasts a life-time, not just a few months. Give us the tools to say it right and we’ll tell you like it is. You know what we call them on our site? Plastic Gypsies.

Roy Wells, then President of the National Gypsy Council, spoke these words in 1975 at the launch of an academic report into the deterioration in relations between house-dwellers and Travellers. Flanked by academics and policy makers he reminded the audience of local authority councillors and officials what it felt like to be in the goldfish bowl of academic research, of the distance between researchers and the researched and of the experience of alienation when the control of a people’s destiny lay elsewhere. He refused to be the ‘token Gypsy’ on someone else’s stage and, with good grace and great oration, he instructed investigators and interventionists that the diverse cultures comprising the Traveller population were neither a curiosity for the voyeuristic gaze nor an alien within. He was under no illusion about the purpose of government-funded research. It would, as it always had, inform new strategies of surveillance, regulation and control. It would result in laws and policies to ‘discipline’ Travellers in a move towards the longer-term objective of enforced assimilation.

At the time I worked with Irish Traveller families in Liverpool. As a researcher I knew the realities and difficulties of being an insider–outsider. On the site daily, I spent more time there than most Traveller men. Involved with the on-site Travellers’ school, in contesting imminent evictions and in reading and writing letters for families, I was an ‘insider’ in terms of trust. Yet I was an outsider in every other way, struggling with the seemingly implicit contradictions of my research. While I experienced the apparent vagaries of an ever-changing ‘community’ and came to some understanding of its historical and contemporary realities, I witnessed the direct impact on families of unremitting interpersonal and institutionalised racism.

I visited the West Midlands where, during a technically unlawful eviction, three children had died in a fire as a trailer (caravan) had been ripped from its jacks. Writing from jail, Johnny ‘Pops’ Connors (1973:167) describes the experience of being an Irish Traveller in mid–1970s West Midlands: ‘my wife kicked black and blue by the police in her own trailer three days before the baby was born; my little son very badly injured and my trailer smashed to pieces; the hospital refused to treat us; the councillors said kick them out at all costs’. My first research experience of extreme race hate raised questions well beyond the scope of any academic methodology course I had studied. What kind of men would recklessly evict Travellers, killing their children in the process? What kind of state, supposedly an advanced, inclusive, democratic state, would sanction such acts of brutality? What kind of an investigative and inquisitorial system would deliver verdicts of accidental death? Why did academic research and the care professions seem unconcerned?

Back in Liverpool on the windswept site of urban dereliction that was Everton Brow, the undesignated home to over 50 Irish Traveller families, the local community demanded evictions and threatened violence. A leaflet dropped through letter boxes in neighbouring streets:

TINKERS OUT

THE RESIDENTS OF EVERTON ARE SICK OF THE FILTH AND SQUALOR BROUGHT TO THEIR COMMUNITY BY IRISH TINKERS. LOCAL COUNCILLORS PROMISES HAVE COME TO NOTHING. IF THESE DIRTY PARASITES ARE NOT REMOVED WE WILL DO THE JOB OURSELVES. THEY ARE A DANGER TO THE HEALTH OF GOOD AND DECENT FAMILIES. THIS IS AN ULTIMATUM: GET THE TINKERS OUT, OR ELSE.

Soon after, a leading Warrington councillor called for a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Gypsy problem’. Given the genocide directed against Roma throughout the Holocaust, his comment was calculated to instil fear within the local Traveller population. Gypsies, classified as genetic asocials by the Nazis, remained the ultimate, collective illustration of ‘otherness’. Even their mass deaths were erased, their suffering ‘largely absent from discussions of the Holocaust, as they are absent from the monuments which memorialise it’ (Clendinnen 1998:10–11).

In this climate of hate Howard Becker’s portrayal of ‘outsider’ was literal. Community leaders and their elected representatives denied legitimacy to Traveller communities, their cultures or ways of life, refusing to negotiate any terms of acceptance. The daily reality of life on Everton Brow was local authority harassment, local community attacks and police brutality. Evictions happened at first light and self-styled, private-hire bailiffs were undiscriminating and unremitting in using force. While men and women defended their homes and families, their children screamed in fear. There were no case studies, ethical guidelines or briefing papers to advise the fledgling researcher on her/his place and role in such circumstances. Academic conferences were as distant in their analyses of such events as were most contributors from the action.

Writing on the hidden history of Aboriginal oppression in Australia, Henry Reynolds recalls meeting two young Aboriginal girls sitting on a dirty mattress on a prison cell floor, surrounded by shards of glass. A bucket for defecation, the air was stale with the stench of urine. Both girls, one bleeding, stood before Reynolds, ashamed. He wondered what dreadful crime had they committed. There was no crime. They had sworn at their teacher and been imprisoned for a day. He was shocked by the arbitrary and ‘grossly disproportionate’ punishment. Yet it was rationalised ‘within the parameters of what was thought normal on the island’. Reynolds concludes, ‘it seemed so utterly out of place in the modern Australia I knew about … if such manifest injustice could flourish in 1968, whatever had been done in the past? If this could be done to children, whatever punishments were meted out to adults? Why didn’t I know? Why hadn’t I been told?’ (Reynolds 1999:7–8).

Three decades on from the Everton Brow evictions, on a cold March day in 2004, I and my co-researcher, Linda Moore, visited the punishment block of the high security Mourne House women’s unit within Maghaberry jail in the north of Ireland. A 17-year-old young woman, by international standards a child, was held in a strip cell for no reason other than that the adult regime could not manage her self-harming behaviour. She was cut from her feet to her hips, from her hands to her shoulders. The skin between cuts had been scoured raw. She had used Velcro tabs on her anti-suicide gown. The tabs removed, the gown was held in place by sellotape. She was deprived of underwear, even during menstruation. The cell was bare, no mattress, no pillow, nothing except an ‘anti-suicide’ blanket and a small cardboard potty for defecation. She slept on a raised concrete plinth. Locked in isolation 23 hours each day her situation was desperate. She felt compelled to self-harm:

I was in a hospital out there [in the community] and I still harmed myself then. I’m not getting the right treatment. They don’t understand why I cut myself and I tell them I have to do it. It’s my only way of coping. I seen Dr [the psychiatrist] and he gave me medication which helped … I shouldn’t be down here. There’s nothing to do. It’s worse in the night. I hear voices and see things. But no-one helps me. I should be in the hospital wing. This place needs a women’s hospital or a special wing for nurses to control and deal with women with problems. They could have got people in to talk to me. To help me deal with my drink and drugs problems. I’ve had no counselling since I’ve been in here.

(Interview, March 2004)

Considered a ‘suicide risk’, she had been accused of inciting other women prisoners to self-harm or take their own lives. Part of her ‘care plan’ was ‘optimal contact’ with staff and prisoners. Isolated from other prisoners, she had minimal interaction with staff. Women held ‘down the Block’ were checked ‘two or three times an hour’ through the day and ‘roughly once an hour at night’ (Interview, Prison Officer, March 2004). ‘Checks’ amounted to ‘looking into the cell’ through a spy-hole. Staff–prisoner contact was left to individual officers’ discretion.

In her home town the young woman’s doctor had removed her from his register, ‘so I had no doctor to set up my medication’. She ‘took other stuff to calm me down’ and ‘tried to stick a glass bottle in my neck’. Charged with possessing an offensive weapon, she was imprisoned. For nine days she was held in the male prison hospital, then transferred to the punishment block: ‘That night I tried to hang myself and they wouldn’t take me back over.’ The ‘voices’ told her to self-harm and it ‘released the pain’. Sleeping without a mattress was ‘terrible … you keep changing positions’, the potty was ‘a disgrace’ and she had no personal contact with officers. During menstruation, ‘They just give you a wee sanitary towel’ but it was ‘hard’ to keep in place without pants (Interview, March 2004).

As we walked from the cell, her words on tape, the emotional mix of sadness, anger and incredulity was overwhelming. Her circumstances typified the ‘duty of care’ provided to women and girls imprisoned within an advanced democratic state constantly proclaiming values of ‘moral renewal’ at home and abroad. I reflected on Henry Reynolds’ questions: if such ‘manifest injustice’ prevailed in 2004, what had been done in the past? If ‘this could be done to children’ what was the fate of women prisoners? How had a process involving doctors, nurses, probation officers, clergy, prison visitors as well as prison officers and their managers become so institutionalised, so accepted, so routine, yet hidden from the world outside? Academics had researched recently in the prisons, why were they unconcerned?

Answers, at least in part, are found in the negative reputation ascribed to female ‘offenders’ and self-harming children classified as ‘behaviour’ or ‘personality disordered’. As with the social and societal reaction to Gypsies and Travellers, cultural and political representation is not happenstance but reflects a ‘system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalised largely without awareness’ (Herman and Chomsky 1988:302). Alternative discourses are rooted in challenging the purposeful, propagandist constructions of what is published as ‘official history’ and embedded in ‘official discourse’. Through personal exploration and revealing context, a process of reinterpretation and understanding, ‘knowing’ offers the antidote to the official suppression of truth and the denial of responsibility, underpinned by witnessing and recording.

Having observed a ‘stark and compelling’ abuse of power by a prison doctor and two health-care officers during his extensive, in-depth research into health care in male prisons, Joe Sim (2003:239–40) raises three questions:

Do they accurately reflect the reality of the interactions that took place? What did I feel about these events both as a critical academic and as a human being? How should I bear witness to them?

Responding, Sim borrows a phrase from Lucy Maher’s research: ‘being there’. He had witnessed a distressed, sick prisoner threatened, cajoled and dismissed by captors wielding immediate discretionary power. The prisoner’s ‘subjugation was intensified and his acute distress remained untreated’. It was one of numerous encounters with those

in the hospital wings because they were physically ill, psychologically distressed, had attempted suicide, or simply needed psychological and sometimes physical protection from the everyday ravages of prison culture. They were thus near the bottom of the prison hierarchy. Conducting the research – ‘being there’ – was often a gruelling experience which was saturated by a sense of outrage, not only at the abject and corrosive conditions in which the prisoners were detained and examined, but also at the often callous, off-hand and brutally capricious medical treatment they received …

(Ibid.: 241)

Sim captures the dilemmas of critical research in process. His observation of the power dynamic was neither amorphous nor tangential. It was specific, blatant and painful. ‘Being there’ at that moment bore witness to an act of unacceptable yet institutionally normalised degradation. It raised issues of intervention, interpretation, responsibility, complicity and identification. It lies at the heart of critical research, setting out to challenge official discourse and the protected boundaries of academic disciplines through seeking alternative interpretations of social and political reality.

Establishing a critical research agenda

In the 1960s sociology emerged as a seemingly significant site of critical analysis, challenging the very ethos and questioning the independence of the academic institutions in which it was based. Yet in the USA the early development and eventual consolidation of social science disciplines serviced the needs of giant corporations through cradle-to-grave management of workers and their families. Beyond the factories, they operated to politically manage the poor, the unemployed, the ‘problem populations’ and the neighbourhoods in which they lived. This included working as architects of the apartheid policies and practices that condemned Native Americans to increasingly restrictive reservations, while regulating ‘non-white’ immigration and migration. Despite some notable exceptions, academic social scientists produced ‘knowledge’ useful to a political economic form predicated on, and reproductive of, structural inequalities. Not only were social sciences complicit in capitalist expansionism, they were on hand to contain social and political conflict through mapping social, economic and criminal justice interventions. State welfare programmes appeared to identify and administer to the needs of the marginalised and the destitute, but in reality they managed the consequences of communities fractured by economic exploitation, endemic unemployment, inadequate housing and chronic ill-health.

In 1959 C. Wright Mills published The Sociological Imagination, in which he mounted a blistering attack on the ‘inhibitions, obscurities and trivialities’ of mainstream social science research (Wright Mills 1959:20). His analysis exposed academia’s servile and servicing association with state institutions and giant corporations. He was ‘opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social enquiry by “methodological pretensions”, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialise it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues’ (ibid.). The lives, experiences and opportunities of ordinary people, their neighbourhoods, their communities and their associated tensions had been decontextualised. In the shadow of McCarthyism and the chill of Cold War politics sociology’s critical edge had diminished. Its ‘tendencies’ were ‘towards fragmentary problems and scattered causation’, its direction ‘conservatively turned to the use of the corporation, army and the state’.

Within social sciences, the city, the neighbourhood and the street had been reduced to social laboratories: a disconnected and ahistorical context. People’s experiences, values and opportunities were neglected as state departments and corporate interests commissioned research that denied social inquiry its critical potential. The independence and integrity of academics had become compromised by close association with the military– industrial complex. State welfare programmes, employing ‘social scientists’ with professional training in social work, health, welfare and other related areas prioritised policy and practice interventions based on classification and regulation over care and advocacy. State-sponsored academic research could not be considered independent, rigorous or value-free. Wright Mills (ibid.: 193) argued that social scientists were hired for their utility; as ‘technicians’ who accepted ‘problems and ai...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Challenging academic orthodoxy, recognising and proclaiming ‘values’ in critical social research
• 2 ‘Unreasonable force’: policing marginalised communities in the 1980s
• 3 ‘Lost lives, hidden voices’: deaths and violence in custody
• 4 ‘Negligence without liability’: the scale of injustice after Hillsborough
• 5 ‘Licensed to kill’: the Dunblane shootings and their aftermath
• 6 Children on trial: prosecution, disclosure and anonymity
• 7 ‘Asbo-mania’: the regulation and criminalisation of children and young people
• 8 Children, young people and conflict in the North of Ireland
• 9 Self harm and suicide in a women’s prison
• 10 ‘Nasty things happen in war’
• 11 ‘Speaking truth to power’: critical analysis as resistance
• Bibliography
• Index