Time to be a bit more serious now. (No, really, stop laughing.)
Team Stroppyblog are always correct when they point out that the Left does not take issues of women’s liberation seriously enough. It’s still shocking that they are still needing to make such a case. Thankfully, the Feminist Fightback conference (tomorrow, 12pm, SOAS – don’t forget!) will go some way to start to address this imbalance.
However, one key area which I feel has been poorly affected is the area of criminal justice. To be fair, the Left has not totally ignored questions of law, criminality and justice, but it has generally been focused around questions of free speech, free assembly, and matters which can generally be collected around ‘political democracy’. However, questions of crime – drug crime, crimes against property, etc – are generally woefully overlooked.
At the moment, in England and Wales, our prison population currently stands at 75,320 with another 10,000 in Scotland, Nothern Ireland and the Channel Islands. This includes prisoners on remand. Given that, according to the British Crime Survey, violent crimes have dropped by 43% since their peak in 1995 and have flatlines since then, it seems that most crimes these days are generally property related.
This is nothing new. Of course, our penal system is, to coin a phase, an absolute disaster. At the moment, we have prisoners who are being held in police cells. The Howard League for Penal Reform has campaigned, amongst other things, against the rise of suicides and self harm in prisons, as well as examining conditions for young and women prisioners.
In short, ‘our’ criminal justice system is failing those it is supposed to help. Tony Blair went hell-for-leather on ‘tackling crime, tackling the causes of crime’. It’s a neat soundbite, I’ll give him that, but we have seen very little of the latter, while plenty of the former. We have seen the introduction of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, which are used when a criminal conviction is impossible (generally because the ASBO’d individual hasn’t actually committed a crime). We’ve seen our prison population increase at a time when crime rates are falling.
Something is desperatly wrong. The fear of crime is rising, fuelled by an authoritarian ‘Labour’ government and right wing newspapers. We (well, I mean ‘they’ really) have developed a culture of curtain-twitching.
This is something I intend to examine, as well as the causes of crime, the class nature of capitalist ‘justice’ as well as issues of penal reform and sentancing.
Stay tuned.
EDIT: Sofie B alerts me to this. I was wrong, OK?
