Social Justice and Social Policy in Scotland

Gerry Mooney, Gill Scott, Mooney, Gerry, Scott, Gill

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781847427038
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447308324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política social

Social justice and social policy in Scotland offers a critical engagement with the state of social policy in one of the devolved nations of the UK, a decade after the introduction of devolution.

Promoting greater social justice has been held up as a key vision of successive Scottish administrations since devolution began. It is argued throughout this important book that the analysis of Scottish social policy must therefore be located in wider debates around social injustice as well as about how the devolution process affects the making, implementation and impact of social policy.

Social justice and social policy in Scotland focuses on a diverse range of topics and issues, including income inequalities, work and welfare, criminal justice, housing, education, health and poverty, each reflecting the themes of social inequality and social justice.

This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, policy makers and practitioners as well as students of social policy and of society in Scotland and other devolved nations.

ELEVEN

Criminal justice, social inequalities
and social justice

Hazel Croall

Introduction

Crime and criminal justice are intricately linked to the issues of welfare and social justice that form the focus of this collection. The clientele of police stations, courts and prisons are largely drawn from the most deprived groups and crime has a disproportionate impact on the poor. With its renowned Children’s Hearings system and greater emphasis on rehabilitative social work with offenders, it has been argued that Scotland, before devolution, took a more welfarist and less punitive approach than many other jurisdictions, but that paradoxically, since devolution, there has been a process of ‘detartanisation’ (McAra, 2008; Croall et al, 2010; Munro et al, 2010), followed, arguably, by greater divergence and ‘retartanisation’ (McNeill, 2011) with the election of a Scottish National Party (SNP) minority Scottish government in 2007, a process which may well continue with the election of a majority SNP government in 2011.

This chapter begins by exploring the different ways in which crime, victimisation and criminal justice are linked to social inequalities in Scotland, before looking at the global and national context of criminal justice policy and the extent to which these have affected policies in Scotland. This broad analysis is followed by a brief account of key areas of criminal justice policy, looking at: youth justice, renowned internationally for its welfarist approach; imprisonment and community sentencing, topics featuring strongly in current debates; and, in contrast, the very different arrangements for corporate and environmental crime. Finally, it discusses issues of divergence and convergence, criminal and social justice before briefly considering some alternative approaches.

Crimes and social inequalities

It is first necessary to consider the controversial term ‘crime’ which, despite its widespread use, has defied legal, sociological or popular definition (Muncie et al, 2010; Croall, 2011). While often linked to criminal law, activities legally defined as crime change over time, and what people perceive to be ‘criminal’ is dependent on a cultural context. The negative stereotyping surrounding ‘neds’ in Scotland in the mid-2000s (a derogatory term applied to hooligans, louts or petty criminals), for example, amounted to the virtual criminalisation of some aspects of young people’s behaviour and indeed style of dress. The label ‘crime’ or ‘criminal’ can also be used politically, as seen in the efforts of politicians to attribute the so-called ‘riots’ in several major English cities in August 2011 to ‘criminality’, thereby refuting any suggestions that social inequalities or government policies were to blame. What is perceived as crime affects whether acts are reported to the police by victims and witnesses and whether the police choose to take action and ‘count’ them as crime. Police activity can therefore ‘create’ crime – while it is often assumed that ‘more bobbies on the beat’ will reduce crime, it can also have the effect of inflating numbers of arrests and reported crimes, particularly in those areas where they choose to be ‘on the beat’. Activities such as anti-social behaviour, groups such as young people, and areas can therefore be subjected to greater criminalisation. So contested is the concept of crime that some have argued for the use of the term ‘social harm’ which draws attention to the very different ways in which different ‘harms’ are subjected to law and censure (Tombs and Hillyard, 2004).

Official statistics about crime are therefore notoriously unreliable (Maguire, 2007; Croall, 2011) although they are often, misleadingly, used as an indicator of the success or otherwise of policies. The publication, in September 2010, of figures indicating that crime, including murders, knife crime and serious assaults, had fallen across Scotland in 2010 (Donnelly, 2010; The Scottish Government, 2010), and subsequent figures showing declining rates in 2011, have been claimed as successes for government policies and police initiatives (Leask and Devlin, 2011).

It is important to place these figures, and politicians’ tendency to ‘talk up’ crime (McAra, 2008) in the context of consistently falling rates of crime, including youth crime (Burman, 2010), across the UK from around the mid-1990s, following steep rises from the late 1950s (Maguire, 2007; Reiner, 2007). Increases have variously been related to the enhanced opportunities provided by consumer goods and cars, to growing numbers of police, an increasing willingness to report crime and, from the mid-1980s onwards, to the massive social changes brought about by deindustrialisation and rising levels of unemployment, casual employment and income inequality (Reiner, 2007; Hale, 2009), said to be associated not only with crime but with a range of social issues (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). Recent decreases, particularly in property crime, can in large part be explained by technological factors such as increased security, particularly in relation to cars (Croall, 2011).

Scotland has seen consistently lower rates of victimisation than England and Wales and 2008/09 figures indicate rates of 23.4 per cent in England and Wales, 20.4 per cent in Scotland and 13.4 per cent in Northern Ireland (Muir, 2010). While in all jurisdictions violent crime forms a small proportion compared to property crime, these 2008/09 figures indicate that it constitutes 30 per cent of crime in Scotland, compared to 20 per cent in England and Wales. Crime has also not fallen as quickly in Scotland as in England. As in all jurisdictions, recorded crime rates are higher in cities such as Glasgow, which has been associated with a high murder rate (although this has recently fallen), Edinburgh and Dundee, with lowest rates in primarily rural areas such as Dumfries and Galloway, and the Northern region including the Highlands and Islands (The Scottish Government, 2008a; Mooney et al, 2010).

Crime is often popularly, however mythically (Hancock and Mooney, 2011), associated with social deprivation, with the ‘dangerous classes’ inhabiting ‘dangerous’ areas such as Scotland’s ‘schemes’ – and the East End of Glasgow in particular has been negatively associated with the so-called underclass, ‘Shettleston Man’ or ‘Broken Britain’ (Law et al, 2010; Mooney et al, 2010; Croall, 2011). These areas are most often the focus of police and other initiatives against youth crime and underlie the current association of crime with the ‘three “d’s” of “drink, drugs and deprivation”’ (The Scottish Government, 2007; McNeill, 2011).

Exploring what are complex relationships is far from easy. The socioeconomic status of convicted offenders is not recorded and they are far from representative. Nonetheless, a number of Scottish studies echo those from elsewhere and suggest that while involvement in crime is common for youth across the social spectrum, more serious and persistent offenders, including knife users and those involved in gang violence, are more likely come from the most deprived backgrounds (Bannister et al, 2010; McAra and McVie, 2010a; McVie, 2010). The class-based nature of the criminal justice process is starkly illustrated in research carried out for the Scottish Prison Service which related prisoners’ postcodes to the socioeconomic classifications of their areas, and indicated that:

• 28 per cent of prisoners, compared with 10 per cent of the general population, came from the ‘poorest council estates’;

• half of the prisoner population came from 155 of 1,222 local government wards – all characterised by social deprivation;

• the male imprisonment rate from the 27 most deprived wards amounted to 953 per 100,000 of the population compared to the national average of 237;

• one in nine young men from the most deprived communities will have spent time in prison by the age of 23 (Houchin, 2005).

Inequalities are also seen in relation to victimisation. While rich and poor alike are victimised (the rich, for example, possess more goods and more conspicuous items such as desirable cars to tempt thieves), surveys suggest that the most deprived experience more kinds of crime more often, are more seriously affected by victimisation and are less able to protect themselves (Croall, 2007a). While these largely quantitative studies inadequately capture the ‘lived reality’ of crime, it is clear that life in some areas can involve daily experiences of verbal, racial or sexual harassment, threats of and actual violence along with vandalism, theft and burglary. The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) indicates that around one in ten people in the 15 per cent most deprived areas reported such crimes compared to one in 25 in the rest of Scotland (The Scottish Government, 2009). People from the most deprived areas are also more likely to report feeling unsafe and to see crime as a growing problem in their area (MacLeod et al, 2009).

Socioeconomic inequalities are strongly related to inequalities of age, gender and ‘race’ and ethnicity which cannot be fully explored here, and some of which are discussed in other chapters in this volume. Young people, who are more often on the street, thereby attracting more attention, are subject to more stringent policing and surveillance (McAra and McVie, 2005, 2007, 2010a). Young men are more likely to be convicted of crime than young women, and gender is a key factor in relation to domestic and other forms of violence. Many women in prison are victims of abuse and poverty (McMillan, 2010). Members of racial and ethnic groups, along with religious groups and people with disabilities, are also particularly vulnerable to harassment and so-called ‘hate crime’. Although Scotland has a smaller and differently constituted minority ethnic population to that in England (fewer Afro-Caribbeans with Asians as the largest group), and did not see the urban unrest widely associated with racial groups in England such as the ‘riots’ of the 1980s popularly associated with Afro-Caribbeans and those of the 1990s and 2000s in Northern English towns associated with Asian youth (Webster, 2007), minority ethnic young people complain of racial harassment and ‘over-policing’ (Goodall et al, 2003; Croall and Frondigoun, 2010). The absence of ‘riots’ in Scotland in 2011 is briefly explored below.

The many attempts to account for these relationships cannot be discussed in depth here (Grover, 2008; Mooney et al, 2010; Croall, 2011). Many involve forms of ‘poor blaming’, from early sociological and criminological perspectives looking at ‘sub’cultures or social ‘dis’organisation, through notions of the criminal ‘underclass’ with its alleged ‘dependency culture’, to the later discourse of social exclusion – in itself often implying some fault in the poor or workless. There is, however, no simple or straightforward relationship between worklessness and crime, as crime rates can rise in times of affluence when there are more criminal opportunities and recession. Many studies suggest that crime is not necessarily related to absolute but to relative deprivation, and to widening economic inequalities (Young, 1999, 2007; Hale, 2009). Moreover, rather than unemployment per se, the growth of casual, poorly paid labour and deskilling are also important (Hale, 2009).

This must, however, be set against the vast amount of crime committed by more wealthy individuals, by corporations and state agencies. Often known as the crimes of the powerful, these are not generally regarded as crime and subject to far lower levels of criminalisation despite their considerable physical, economic and emotional impact. They include serious frauds, ‘safety crime’ (Tombs and Whyte, 2007), crimes against consumers and environmental or eco crime (Walters, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c; Croall, 2011). Fraud, for example, has been said to cost each Scottish citizen around £330 each year, and many of the 32 fatal and 2,721 major injuries to workers reported in Scotland in 2007/08 can be attributed to breaches or neglect of safety regulations (Tombs, 2010; Croall, 2011).

Of particular concern are cases in which mass deaths are subsequently attributed to failures on the part of management or regulators. Scottish cases include:

• The explosions on the Piper Alpha North Sea oil production platform in 1988 that killed 167 workers. While investigations identified shortcomings in preparations for a major emergency and in the Department of Energy’s enforcement, the company, Occidental Petroleum Ltd, was not subsequently prosecuted for any offence (Ross and Croall, 2010).

• In December 1999, a family were killed in an explosion in Larkhall, attributed to leakage from severely corroded pipes that had been known about since 1986. Transco PLC were subsequently convicted for failing to replace the pipes and fined £15 million (Ross and Croall, 2010).

• In May 2004, an explosion caused by gas escaping from corroded pipes destroyed a factory in Maryhill, Glasgow owned by ICL Plastics, killing 9 workers and injuring 33. A subsequent report found that the company had not cooperated with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) who in turn had failed to carry out inspections (Ross and Croall, 2010).

Environmental crime involves a range of offences including pollution, and a recent audit of 405 of Scotland’s ‘largest and most complex’ industries revealed that almost 10 per cent failed annual Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) pollution inspections (Walters, 2010a). Of particular concern has been pollution associated with the defence and nuclear industries, which also illustrates state involvement. For example:

• The Dounreay nuclear power facilities have been responsible for recklessly releasing thousands of radioactive particles, and the UK government has attempted to cover up its negligence (Walters, 2010a). It was convicted and fined £140,000 in 2007 (Edwards, 2009).

• The Hunterston B plant in North Ayrshire has one of the worst records for safety incidents, having recorded 24 fires and leaks since 2001 (Edwards, 2009).

• Faslane, the nuclear submarine base, has been associated with a series of serious safety breaches, and the Ministry of Defence has admitted poor maintenance, training and staffing. SEPA has stated that it would close the base down if it had the legal powers (Edwards, 2009).

It is also important to recognise that the impact of corporate crime falls heavily on the most deprived (Croall, 2007b, 2011). It is very often workers, often in the least well paid and most casualised industries, whose safety is most endangered, and poorer consumers who have little choice but to buy cheap, but unsafe or substandard goods who are physically or economically harmed. Those living in the most deprived areas also suffer from the poorest air quality (Walters, 2010a).

Criminalisation, criminal and social justice

Criminal justice reflects and reinforces the operation of these inequalities through the process of criminalisation, which includes the designation of activities as ‘crime’, along with the operation of policing, the courts and sentencing. The introduction of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), for example, effectively criminalised a whole range of ‘incivilities’, not hitherto regarded as crime, which were predominantly associated with areas of social housing (Burney, 2009). It will be seen below that a more punitive rhetoric towards youth crime from the 1990s was accompanied by increasing rates of imprisonment – despite the decreasing crime rates noted above. As outlined, policing is also important as the police must, in response to public, political and media pressure, prioritise certain crimes and areas for greater attention – choices which tend to inv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• ONE: Devolution, social justice and social policy: the Scottish context
• TWO: Between autonomy and dependency: state and nation in devolved Scotland
• THREE: Income and wealth inequalities in Scotland since 1997
• FOUR: From social inclusion to solidarity: anti-poverty strategies under devolution
• FIVE: Regeneration policy and equalities issues
• SIX: Migration, ‘race’ equality and discrimination: a question of social justice
• SEVEN: Health policy and health inequalities
• EIGHT: The coming of age of Scottish social services?
• NINE: Education policy and social justice
• TEN: Policies for young people in contemporary Scotland: a ‘lost generation’?
• ELEVEN: Criminal justice, social inequalities and social justice
• TWELVE: Working Scotland
• THIRTEEN: Social housing and homelessness policies: reconciling social justice and social mix
• FOURTEEN: Environmental justice: a question of social justice?
• FIFTEEN: Conclusion: towards a new phase of devolution?