The Penal Landscape

The Howard League Guide to Criminal Justice in England and Wales

Anita Dockley, Ian Loader, Anita Dockley, Ian Loader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135919924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The Howard League for Penal Reform is committed to developing an effective penal system which ensures there are fewer victims of crime, has a diminished role for prison and creates a safer community for all. In this collection of ten papers, the charity has brought together some of the most prominent academic experts in the field to map out what is happening in a specific area of criminal justice policy, ranging from prison privatisation to policing and the role of community sentences.

The Howard League guide has two main aims: first it seeks to paint a picture of the current state of the penal system, using its structures, processes and the specific groups affected by the system as the lens for analysis. However, each author also seeks to identify the challenges and gaps in understanding that should be considered to predicate a move towards a reduced role for the penal system, and prison in particular, while maintaining public confidence and safer communities. In doing so, we hope to inspire researchers and students alike to develop new research proposals that challenge the status quo and seek to create the Howard League's vision for the criminal justice system with less crime, safer communities, fewer people in prison.

1

SOCIAL STRUCTURAL PROCESSES AND THE OPERATION OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

STEPHEN FARRALL

This chapter will focus on those aspects of wider society (including the economy) which operate in such a way as to influence aspects of individuals’ and communities’ experiences of crime and disorder. The review is geared in part to an examination of how such practices impede the desires of those individuals who wish to move away from crime. It starts by examining the relationship between crime and the economy before looking at examples of changes in social policies; moving on to consider how social structures may impede desistance from crime. It concludes by reflecting on what the criminal justice system might consider doing to try to overcome some of these processes.

THE ECONOMY–CRIME LINK

There is an extensive and long-standing literature on the relationship between economic conditions and crime (see Chiricos 1987; Pyle and Deadman 1994). Studies often assume that shifts in the economy ‘cause’ variations in criminal behaviour. The literature suggests that lagged or coincident indicators of economic conditions (such as the unemployment rate, income inequality and GDP), contribute to increased rates of property crime either through economic need and criminal motivation or through the relative availability of ‘stealable’ commodities. There are, however, conflicting theories about this relationship. Of course, the relationship between the economy and crime interacts with effects of other social and criminal justice policies. Hale and Sabbagh (1991), for example, reported that the increase in police officers in Britain during the 1980s was nullified by the sizeable increases in unemployment experienced at that same time. Similarly, Reilly and Witt (1992) identified an association between unemployment and crime (this was mitigated by government spending), with housing expenditure associated with reductions in crime.

REVIEWING THE RECENT UK EXPERIENCE

In May 1979 a little over one million people were unemployed. This figure reached two million by November 1980 and rose to 2.5 million by June 1981. By March 1982, three million were unemployed, and the figure stood at 3.4 million in 1986, dropping to two million in February 1991, before rising again to three million in 1993. The result was that, in the early 1980s, many working-class young people left school in the north and midlands of England, Wales and Scotland with no prospect of finding work locally. The policy responses were to force young people into lower paid jobs which either failed to equip them with skills which were needed by the economy at that time or were simply jobs that their parents had done previously and been paid more for (see Carlen 1996: 46).

In the last 30 years, one of the most significant changes experienced by the UK economy has been a change in the nature of available employment. In particular, there has been a significant decrease in the manufacturing sector of the economy. Social Trends reports that:

Over the last 25 years the UK economy has experienced structural change. The largest increase in employee jobs has been in the banking, finance and insurance industry, where the number of employee jobs has doubled between June 1981 and June 2006 from 2.7 million to 5.4 million. There were also large increases in employee jobs in public administration, education and health (up by 40%) and in the distribution, hotels and restaurants industry (up by 34%). In contrast, the extraction and production industries, made up of agriculture and fishing, energy and water, manufacturing, and construction showed a combined fall of 43 per cent from 8.2 million jobs in 1981 to 4.7 million jobs in 2006. Manufacturing alone accounted for 81 per cent of this decline, with the number of employee jobs in this sector nearly halving from 5.9 million in 1981 to 3 million in 2006.

(Office for National Statistics 2007: 47)

Alongside the decrease in manual labour, there has been an increase in jobs in the knowledge economy (i.e. banking, finance and insurance). Such jobs, generally speaking, require graduate-level (or equivalent) skills, are highly competitive and essentially ‘white collar’ occupations. They are not usually jobs which those with few (or no) formal skills are able to either gain or even aspire to. In addition, there has been an increasing tendency for employers to ask prospective employees to undergo a Criminal Records Bureau check demonstrating no previous convictions which potentially creates difficulties for those with convictions seeking employment.

More broadly, the general tendency of recent structural change in employment in the UK is towards an increasing polarisation between two groups of potential employees: those who can evidence their skills on paper and as such are deemed ‘employable’ and those who have not sought, or have been unable to seek, such qualifications and as such are considered ‘unemployable’ (Furlong and Kelly 2005). Within such a context some of the effects of recent national educational policies, especially the introduction of ‘league tables’ of schools based on examination results, should also be noted. While such policies have raised aggregate performance levels, they also seem to have encouraged the practice of school exclusion for less successful pupils (seen as potentially disruptive). Thus the polarisation seen in the workplace is also refracted in the classroom (Willis 1977).

The social and economic change experienced in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular widespread unemployment, geographical concentration of social and economic deprivation via housing policies and the growth of inequalities coupled with real term reduction in social benefits, can be argued to have long-lasting legacies on the production of crime, public attitudes and criminal justice policies. The strengthening effect of the economy–crime link over time (Farrall and Jennings 2012), rising crime rates, increased public fear of crime and the increased salience of crime as a political issue led parties in government and opposition to emphasise punitive, ‘hard line’ thinking on crime in place of the social welfare model adopted by all British political parties before the 1980s. As such, the current ‘imprisonment binge’ owes much to shifts in the economy (themselves brought on in part by changes in macro-economic philosophy) rather than any sustained thinking on appropriate responses to crime.

The housing market

Sales of council houses were announced by Michael Heseltine in 1979 and homelessness began an immediate rise (Timmins 2001: 379). Murie (1997: 26) describes this process as one of ‘residualisation’ whereby council estates came to house the most disadvantaged. It is true that little new council housing stock has been built since the early 1980s (Murie 1997: 28), in some areas creating populations with high turnovers and therefore perhaps leading to higher levels of crime but less engagement with the police (Hope et al. 2002). Housing policies pursued in the 1980s created more people who were dependent upon the state, and ultimately created more ‘sink’ estates. Cardboard cities emerged in London (amongst other places) as a result of barring teenagers from benefits – one side effect of the new Youth Training Scheme. The results of the changes in housing provision, linked to economic recession and cutbacks in welfare provisions, are further documented by Carlen (1996).

Social security provision

Although the proportion of government spending on social security increased between 1980 and 1999, there were cutbacks to all forms of social security provision. Whilst the aim was to create greater responsibility on the part of individuals in the provision of their own social security, Family Credit operated in such a way as to trap more people in the worst paid jobs (Marwick 2003: 299). The running down of social services resulted in deprivation, neglect, increasing atomisation and social divisions (Marwick 2003: 372). The reforms undertaken in the mid 1980s had the net effect of reducing the benefits of those under 25 years of age, without children and the unemployed (Timmins 2001: 399). From April 1988, 16–17 year olds were no longer eligible for income support, instead needing to register for Youth Training Schemes (Timmins 2001: 447). However, the scheme ignored the fact that many young children had left home after abuse, were released from care, or could not be found a Youth Training Scheme place. These young people ended up on the streets (Timmins 2001: 447–8). As Andrews and Jacobs concluded in their review of poverty in the 1980s, for many, especially the more vulnerable members of society (such as single women with young children and those aged under 25), the changes in social security initiated by the Thatcher governments appeared only to have ‘closed down the escape hatches from poverty’ (1990: 282). As some have noted (e.g. Carlen 1996: 44) it was the New Right’s own economic policies which led to increased spending on unemployment and furthered their own calls for cutbacks in public spending. Such cutbacks encouraged young people towards situations in which they became embroiled in crime (Carlen 1996: 47, 82). Similar policies stemming from the austerity measures of the current Coalition government relating to housing, the economy and social security in this respect are likely to lead to increases in crime, making desistance less attractive and harder to achieve.

Education and school exclusion policies

There is little doubt that the legislation enacted during the 1980s had profound effects upon the education system in the UK. Staff–student ratios went up during this time, arguably leading to greater disruption in classes, more exclusions and greater levels of staff absenteeism, not helped by the reduction in the status of teachers fostered by the government. In 1992 the first league tables of school exam results were published (Timmins 2001: 519). These had the unfortunate side effect of encouraging schools to exclude unruly children (school exclusions rose throughout the 1990s until reaching a peak of 12,668 in 1996–7 (DfES 2001)¹), who, dumped on the streets, only served to cause further problems for other local residents and the police (Timmins 2001: 566).

The social, ethnic and geographical concentration of poverty

Standard, international measures of the distribution of wealth in a nation, such as the Gini coefficient, demonstrate growing inequalities in the UK from the late 1970s (Stymne and Jackson 2000). These inequalities – in all likelihood due to shifts in taxation – increased dramatically from the early to mid 1980s at a time when other countries (e.g. Sweden) saw declines in the Gini coefficient. Atkinson (2000: 364–5) notes that between the end of the Second World War and the late 1970s the trend in the distribution of wealth in the UK was strongly egalitarian. However, after the end of the 1970s this picture changed dramatically. Between 1979 and 1985 widening inequality was due to many families losing their incomes as unemployment rose (Atkinson 2000: 365). From 1985–90, however, the inequalities were due largely to government policies (Atkinson 2000: 365). As Garnett and Aitken note, between 1977 and 1980 unemployment amongst black people in Bristol (the scene of a riot in April 1980) had doubled, whilst it had declined for white people (2003: 252).

Timmins (2001: 375) is not alone in noting the ‘marked widening in the gap between rich and poor during the Thatcher years’, reporting that as early as the late 1980s the first signs that the UK was becoming a more unequal society were emerging (2001: 449). In 1948 only one million people needed national assistance; by 1993, 5.6 million people were living on income support as a result of increases in income inequality (Timmins 2001: 497–8). Walker (1990) reports that the number of people reliant on income support increased by 45 per cent during the period from around three million in 1979 to 4.35 million in 1989. If one includes the dependants of claimants, as many as seven million people were reliant upon income support during the 1980s. Further evidence in the mid 1990s suggested that the poor in the UK were getting poorer (Timmins 2001: 507). With long-term unemployment endemic in some parts of the UK, many residents found themselves reliant on benefits for extended periods of time, making working cash-in-hand or claiming and working more socially acceptable (Timmins 2001: 526).

Spillover and cascading influences

In a number of papers (Hay and Farrall 2011; Farrall and Hay 2010) Colin Hay and I have outlined what we have called a ‘cascade theory’ of radical social and economic policies. The argument is that radical policy changes in one area (which may appear unrelated to crime) may well come to have quite pronounced impacts on crime and the way in which it is viewed and dealt with. Whilst the Thatcher governments were immediately radical in economic policy, few have seen them as being in any way radical in relation to crime policies. The ultimate consequences of that economic radicalism were a profound increase in levels of unemployment, social inequality and social polarisation that were reflected in a steep increase in rates of crime. Similarly, the radicalism associated with the changes to the housing market had significant consequences and spillover effects. The right to buy one’s own council house, coupled with the requirement in the Housing Act 1985 that local councils house homeless people and the impact of the Social Security Act 1988 created a situation in which disadvantaged members of society were corralled together in particular estates in which low-level antisocial behaviour and crime became commonplace. This was to become an important element of the context in which crime and criminal justice policy would eventually be radicalised.

In a not unrelated set of processes, the changes in the social security system stemmed from the need to halt the rise in expenditure which followed the increase in unemployment in the early 1980s. These resulted in the creation of a series of traps which made escape from lifestyles in which off ending and victimisation were common difficult. As has recently been shown, the reduction in social security spending and the increase in economic inequalities led to a steep rise in acquisitive crime during the 1980s (Farrall and Jennings 2011, 2012; Jennings et al. 2012).

The radicalism of the reform of the education system also served to alter experiences of crime. Reforming the education system made the management of schools harder by rising staff–student ratios and creating a series of spillover effects for communities and policing in terms of the numbers of young people excluded from schools. As with changes in the economy, housing provision and social security provision, the side effects included (but were not limited to) widening inequality; unemployment; ‘sofa-surfing’; the creation of ‘sink estates’ and excluded pupils. All of these were to have significant ramifications for both crime and the criminal justice system.

THINKING ABOUT THIS IN RELATION TO DESISTANCE FROM CRIME

How important are the sorts of social and economic structures described above in enabling or hindering would-be desisters’ attempts to become more integrated into society? A key focus is the relationship(s) between a potential desister’s own actions and those structural properties of any social system which are important to desistance. A decade ago, Ben Bowling and I argued that ‘the process of desistance is one that is produced through an interplay between individual choices, and a range of wider social forces, institutional and societal practices which are beyond the control of the individual’ (Farrall and Bowling 1999: 261). The central premise is that desisting from crime, be it the sort of desistance which requires an all-encompassing reorganisation of the individual’s sense of self (Maruna and Farrall 2004) or those mor...