Gary Fraser looks at the role of incarceration in British society and asks what the UK’s fascination is with young people and jail.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, reflecting on the history of penal reform and prison in Western Europe made the remark that ‘failure never matters’. It was an acute observation. Despite masses of empirical evidence that prison is expensive and in regards to recidivism, counter-productive, the British government continues to incarcerate, both the adult population, and for the purpose of this article, young people, at an alarming rate. Labour, after ten years in power has continued to promote the political chimera, which has become a shibboleth of modern government, that ‘prison works’. Surely it is time to question this orthodoxy and ask why, that under a Labour government, which talks a great deal about social inclusion, are so many of our young people are being incarcerated? To understand the origins of Labours fixation with incarceration it is necessary to turn the clock back to the 1990s and the dying days of Conservative Britain, when the architects of New Labour positioned the party as being ‘tough on crime’.

The context of mainstream political life in 1990s Britain was one in which law and order issues rose to the top of the political agenda. Right wing thinking on crime became hegemonic and the left was routinely described as being ‘soft’ on law and order. In any opinion poll regarding political priorities, crime was never too far behind traditional concerns such as health, education and the economy. In the early 1990s, public debate and opinion was undoubtedly drifting towards the right. This in part, reflected the ascendancy of the view promoted by the Tories and the mainstream media, and echoed by Labour, that British society was in the grip of a moral crisis. This moral crisis, according to the right, had been caused and exacerbated by the welfare state which had fostered a dependency culture.

Right wing sociologists theorised that a new ‘underclass’ had emerged in society. The ‘underclass’ were portrayed as an infectious and dangerous sub-group that lived on welfare benefits. It was an extremely gendered discourse. The ‘male’ was constructed as violent, predatory and habitually criminal. The ‘female’ was sexually promiscuous, bore children out of wedlock and in the main was responsible for nurturing a new and dangerous generation of youths, particularly young men. In the race to demonise young people the tabloid press quickly picked up the baton; stories of joyriders and inner city gangs wreaking havoc in housing estates became commonplace. For the tabloids, moral panics, once the unintended outcome of journalistic endeavour now seemed to have become a goal.

The outcome of moral panics was a return to an authoritarian populism and the creation of a climate in which public pressure to make children accountable for wrong doing increased. Moreover, there was a growing concentration on the needs of the victims, prejudiced by the unsubstantiated claim, repeated like a mantra by populist politicians and the press, that the rights of the criminal had superseded the rights of the victim. The political and social consequences of this tough law and order discourse, was to shift the public focus from the welfare of the child to offending behaviour and its consequences.

In the midst of this climate the Liverpool toddler Jamie Bulger was murdered by two ten year old boys. The Bulger killing sent the tabloid press into a feeding frenzy and they realised quickly that child killings and abductions could sell newspapers. In the aftermath of the murder, the press encouraged a demonisation of two small children who they held up as ‘evil’. Chased as they went into court by a lynch mob baying for blood and revenge, Robert Thomson and Jon Venebles, both aged ten, were tried in an adult court, without recourse to psychological support and counselling, with little concession given to their status as children. This case, albeit an extreme example, highlighted just how far welfarism and the rights and well being of the child had slipped off the political agenda.

The Labour party has at times perfected the art of studying and manipulating public opinion. The architects of New Labour (Tony Blair, who before the death of John Smith in 1994 was Shadow Home Secretary) recognised that a drift to the right regarding law and order was taking place. Moreover, Labour were not just interested in pandering to the tabloids, or the readership of the Daily Mail and so called ‘Middle England’, they were also keen to respond to their heartland vote which was to be found in working class housing estates. The 1998 British Crime Survey revealed that three out of every four respondents believed that the police and the courts were too lenient on juveniles. Research has indicated that forty per cent of recorded crime takes place in just ten per cent of areas, the majority of which are poor. Furthermore, more than half of the people who show up in official statistics as victims of crime are repeat victims; the majority are from poor backgrounds. This means that the poor as a proportion of the population face a disproportionate amount of crime (Hughes, et al, 2002).

In the midst of decaying housing estates and the fragmentation and dislocation of the nuclear family compounded by generational unemployment, communities turned inwards upon themselves. In this context, public opinion moved to the right. Fear is deliberately manufactured and then politically exploited, which Labour performed to perfection. Once the political project became that of responding to offering various gestures of popular vengeance, a return to incarceration was inevitable.

New Labours slogan in the 1990s was education, education, education; in terms of crime and justice it could have been jail, jail, jail! Although Labours reforms have introduced a mixed economy of criminal justice, the government has presided over an increase in the number of young people being locked up. Believe it or not, during the Tory years, the incarceration of young people actually fell. The fear on the left and by concerned practitioners who worked with vulnerable young people, that the coming to power of Thatcher, who fought the 1979 election campaign on a strong law and order and anti-youth ticket, would lead to child incarceration spiralling out of control was never realised. The primary reason for a decrease in confinement was a commitment by the Treasury to reduce public expenditure. It was in this context that punishment in the community and alternatives to court and custody began to emerge. However, as we have seen in the nineties when the law and order pendulum swung towards the right, the rate of youth incarceration shot upwards. In 1993, the number of 15-17 year olds held in young offender institutions in England and Wales was 769; by 2002 it was 2,089 (Muncie, et al, 2002).

Labours drive towards incarceration has been exacerbated by two major developments, namely the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (CDA Act), the central piece of their legislative crime agenda, and the implementation of polices under the ubiquitous term anti-social behaviour. The CDA Act enabled the courts to have power to lock up children between the ages of twelve and seventeen for ‘non-grave offences’ (Muncie, et al, 2002). The act also introduced parenting and anti-social behaviour orders and curfews. By 2000, as a consequence of the CDA Act, Britain was sending a greater proportion of its young people to prison than any other European Union state. Anti-social behaviour (ASBO) legislation has contributed towards an increase in child incarceration; breach of an ASBO can lead to prison even when the original offence was non-prisonable. According to the organisation Statewatch, 42% of ASBOS are breached and 46% of those breaches result in a custodial sentence. As a consequence of anti-social behaviour legislation, fifty children a month are being incarcerated in the UK.

The increased incarceration of young people is an issue which needs to be addressed by the left and all those concerned with the welfare of the child. Despite all the available evidence that prison does not work, Labour continues to lock up young people at an alarming rate. In England and Wales, the incarceration of young people, is at a higher rate per one hundred thousand of the population, than any other country in Europe. In 2002, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed ‘deep concern’ at the number of children in custody in England and Wales’.

The ‘prison works’ manta of Labour and neo-liberal governments alike is one which the left needs to challenge. Prison does not impact on the overall crime rate, nor does it reduce the likelihood of re-offending, and neither does it decrease the public’s fear of crime. Instead of rehabilitating people, prison actually manufactures criminals. Contemporary discussion on a ‘crisis in prison’, and ‘over-crowding’ amidst reports of jails ‘bursting at the seams’ will not stop the flow of people entering detention. Instead the response of the government will be to build more jails and detention centres; the development of Private Finance Initiative prisons means that the private sector can make a profit out of jail.

All of the empirical evidence points to the fact the prison is the first step on the road to a life in criminality. Re-conviction rates of young people discharged from custody are high. Regular reports, like those produced by the Children’s Society reveal that the great majority of young people in custody, often for non-violent offences, posed no serious risk to the community prior to incarceration, but became a significant danger on their release. Custody, according to Muncie, et al, leads to broken links with family, friends, education, work and leisure. Moreover, incarceration causes stigmatisation and labelling, which in turn reduced the chances of employment and results in increased alienation amongst young people. Consequently the risk of offending is increased.

Labours talk of ‘early intervention’ is window dressed in progressive jargon. Scratch beneath the surface and you find something more sinister. ‘Early intervention’ has resulted in a ‘net widening’ of the criminal justice system and has drawn traditional welfare orientated sites such as education, health and social work into the business of crime control. Moreover, early intervention has brought about a new penal realm whereby ‘guilt’ is no longer the founding principal of justice, which has resulted in ‘interventions’ being made into the lives of children and young people without the necessity of offence behaviour.

In terms of penal reform, Britain, as in so many other areas, the most obvious being foreign policy, continues to follow a pan-American model. When you compare the UK with Scandinavian countries the difference is striking. Finland, for example, has reduced its young offender population by 90% since 1960 without any consequent rise in offending. This was achieved by suspending imprisonment on the condition that a period of probation was successfully completed. Consequently, immediate ‘unconditional’ sentencing to custody is now a rarity. It is also important to note that Finland has not pursued rigorous neo-liberal winner takes all policies like the US and the UK. In the main, the Finish experience has been successful because they have long recognised that social development policy is also the best crime reduction policy. Britain on the other hand continues with the tried and tested mantra of ‘prison works’. The question in terms of the Labour government is obvious: why given the contemporary emphasis on ‘evidence based’, ‘what works’ and ‘best value’ policies does the state continue with incarceration. The answer is that prison has long been based on political expediency rather than pragmatism. British society is being placed under tightened surveillance, control and fear. Prison is a necessary component of this system and since the eighteenth century has been the states legitimised form of punishment. The continued presence of prison in our society is based on symbolism rather than on any actual usefulness. Prison is a reminder of the states brutality and need for control. The fact that prison does not reduce crime or recidivism is irrelevant; because as Foucault observed, when it comes to the history of prison, ‘failure never matters’.

Gary Fraser has recently completed a Masters in Social Policy and Criminology and is a member of Solidarity.

This article was originally published in the latest issue of Scottish Left Review www.slrp.co.uk