Bangor Socialist Student & Youth Conference

Taken from Socialist Party Wales website - www.socialistpartywales.org.uk

Young Socialists from North Wales received a helping hand from comrades from the South for an all Wales day of action last Saturday in Bangor. The day started with a successful ‘Youth Fight for Jobs’ protest in Bangor.

Report by Sarah Mayo

Workers and students stopped to take our bi-lingual leaflets and sign our petitions and our well travelled ‘YFFJ’ banner attracted a lot of attention (this banner has previously visited Cardiff, Pontypridd and Swansea!)

This was followed by the conference itself, which had sessions on the role of the police, the world economic crisis and a practical session on organising campaigning stalls. Iain Dalton introduced the first session with an emphasis on how the police form a key part of the capitalist state machine and defend private property rather than act in the interests of ordinary people. For example, the police are quick to arrest shop lifters but incredibly slow to respond to domestic burglaries in working class areas. Nevertheless, as workers turn to the police on this issue, it’s important we raise the demand for the democratic control and accountability of the police. There was a far ranging discussion on the socialist analysis of everything from speed cameras, police repression of protesters to domestic violence!


Next, Joe Fathallah gave an excellent and succinct Marxist analysis of the world economic recession and its impact on workers and youth. The economic crisis was inevitable: capitalism is unable to overcome the basic contradiction of ‘boom and bust’ because working class people can’t afford to buy back the goods it produces . The previous long boom could only be sustained by cheap credit and mounting debt for so long. Whilst we are conditional about how long this recession will last, it is clear that workers and young people will be forced to fight back.
The discussion centered on the tasks for socialists, including our socialist programme on the economy, the role of the revolutionary party internationally and the campaign for a new mass workers party here and internationally.

The conference finished with a practical session on running a campaigning stall, with comrades sharing ideas and tips, including how to lay out the stall and how to deal with typical responses to our petitions. This inspiring day finished with an excellent fighting fund collection and a well deserved drink in the pub afterwards.

Review – “Chekisms” A KGB Anthology by Vasiliy Mitrokhin

Ever eager to learn criminological lessons from the Russian Revolution I’ve been looking for interesting material on the Cheka, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. As part of understanding the events of the Russian Revolution we need to be able to examine the bodies used to prevent or deal with criminal activities and whether these were the best methods.

The volume under review covers not only the Cheka but also the OGPU and KGB. It consists on Mitrokhin’s own notes and manuscripts that Mitrokhin had smuggled out of the USSR when he left in 1992. The material is quite revealing, discussing the formation and several early cases of the Cheka, but also dealing with the repression against Trotskyists and others in later years.

Of course my interest lies with early years of the Soviet regime, but Mitrokhin’s material here is mostly his own notes which are full of his own opinions. And these opinions are similar to the ‘original sin’ of Bolshevism idea where Lenin and Stalin are equated, but in this case they are viewed as just more tyrants in a long line of them. Thus Mitrokhin tries to portray Lenin as changing his mind over the need for repressive force after the revolution, even though in his works, including State and Revolution, Lenin points to the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat to repress what remains of the capitalism system.

The big problem I have with this approach is that to truly understand the development of the Cheka, one needs to examine very closely the conditions it was created and developed in and what opposition it was attempting to overcome. Let us not forget that a civil war raged in Russia and that there were assignation attempts on Bolshevik leaders during this period. A detailed study of this period would allow us to come to an opinion as to the necessity of such an organisation preceding from material facts and not just pure moral sentiments. Whilst this book includes some material that could be useful for doing that, it fails at that task itself.

Questions on Crime to a Venezuelan Consul

As I mentioned in my blog post about NUS Conference, during that conference I managed to quiz a Venezuelan consul about crime in Venezuela, below is a brief summary of what we discussed.

The discussion started with me asking a general question as to the effect of crime in Venezuela.
In response, the consul noted the problem of crime, in particular violent crime has beset Venezuela for a long time, yet he believed that the Chavez regime has managed to make inroads into it. For example, he cited life expectancy (increased from around 50 years to 70 years), which he admitted was mostly down to improvements in medical care, but he also believe this was due to lower levels of violence in the country. But he also pointed out that violents crime was historic - for example, earlier in Venezuelan history when European immigrants were invited to settle in the country, many refused becuase they believed it was too dangerous.

We then moved on to talking about prisons, as Venezuela does have notoriously overcrowded prisons.
Again, the consul noted that this is a big problem - but did inform me of a process of 'humanisation of prisons' which has been taking place over the last year which he believed to have been quite succesful - given I hadn't heard of it he recommended I look it up on the internet which I have done (See this article http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3260). One thing that he did mention was some of the projects that have taken place to help Venezuelan prisoners to learn useful skills - mentioning one prison creating a classical music orchestra for example.
Yet conditions in Venezuela still rank below those in the UK's overcrowded prisons. To illustrate this he mentioned a scheme for transfer of prisoners between Britain and Venezuela which British prisoners incarcerated in Venezuela can opt to transfer to serve out their sentence in a British prison and vica-versa. Of those who have taken the offer up, the traffic has been entirely one way - from Venezuela to Britain.

Although we weren't able to talk for too long, I think there are some interesting points which need to be examined - particularly with regards to the prison reforms.

Naming and Shaming

In their all consuming quest to appear 'tough' on crime, government ministers are looking at plans to distribute leaflets to 'name and shame' offenders who have been convicted in local courts. Apparently, making calling community service 'Community Payback' instead and making those on it where high vis jackets simply isn't enough posturing for the government.

'Tough' Measures for Trivial Crimes

According to a report in the Guardian (25/02/09) "Lack of confidence in community payback is one of the primary reasons governments feel forced to build more expensive prisons". To the government's and the media's way of thinking the response to crime needs to be good hard punishment to deter the offender and others from committing more offences. But what good does this actually do?
One of the of adopting measures on the basis of 'toughness' is that it makes them very unlikely to do anything about the reasons why someone is actually committing a crime. Having a criminal record excludes people from certain jobs, and prisons are not exactly the places to send people if you want them to come out completely reformed (with a 60-odd% recidivism rate). Naming and shaming someone for a trivial offence only will serve to add to this problem.

Aim some 'Tough' Measures Elsewhere

Whilst those guilty of minor offences are to be named and shamed, people causing far greater damage often escape unnoticed. And by this I don't just mean the big bankers and the recently exposed fraudsters - I mean those responsible for devastating cuts to local public services, for huge job losses, destroying the environment etc. Indeed, the one area where naming and shaming might be of some use is with people who try to make themselves appear 'respectable'.
But this isn't really what I want to get at. 'Tough' measures need to be taken to put our economy into the hands of ordinary people so masses of profits won't just be tucked away in some Cayman Islands account but be spent on providing meanigful jobs for people, decent homes etc. so that those who commit crime for economic reasons (or reasons flowing from that) have no need to do so.

Accidental Lawbreaking

Another break from Socialism 2008 reports (there are 3 more in the works). I basically need time to write them so I'm publishing this that I'd written beforehand.

Can you break a law by accident? Conventionally, to be found guilty of breaking a law you are usual assumed to have wilfully or recklessly done an action which breaks a law. I’m not sure how this stands leaglly, but to me that assumes that you have knowledge in general that said act is illegal. What if you didn’t though?
Now obviously the vast majority of people know that murder is a crime, the exceptions being very young children, people with serious mental health issues etc. The same can be said for most major crimes. However, what about minor crimes - the potential is there for this to occur.
I wish to cite a few cases how this may happen based on fact. Firstly, the crime may be a very obscure one. This is especially possible given the explosion in criminal offences in recent years. Secondly, there is the case of crimes that relate to a specific area – bye-laws for example could be broken by someone who is not from the area where that bye-law applies to. Thirdly there are the infamous ASBOs which have been used to blanket ban some activities – such as young people gathering in a certain area. Committing a crime in this instance can combine elements of the above – but ASBO’s aren’t criminal legislation although breaching them is a criminal offence.
So what could be done about this. One solution could perhaps be to make people aware of such laws – whether through general education in the case of obscure laws or signage in the case of specific area laws.
I think however, that a more pertinent question is whether we should criminalise these matters at all or whether they are better being dealt with informally. After all, our criminal justice system and prisons are completely clogged up. But I don’t mean by issuing on the spot penalties or administrative penalties to deal with such problems – that method is an essentially arbitrary one which is open to massive abuse. We really need a social approach to dealing with such minor offences rather than a criminal justice one who’s main effect seems to be criminogenic.

Law and Order in Kronstadt

Most people on the left will have heard of Kronstadt – the naval fortress guarding the approach to St. Petersberg. They’ll either know it for one of two reasons, as being a stronghold of the Bolsheviks in the run-up to the 1917 October revolution or for the 1921 uprising. Today, I’m referring to the former, and the running of the fortress by the Soviet during May which Trotsky discusses in his History of the Russian Revolution in the chapter Shifts in the Masses.

So what happened? On May 13 the Soviet resolved that it was the sole power in the fortress and deported the government commissar. According to Trotsky, “Model order was maintained. Card playing in the city was forbidden. All brothels were closed, and their inmates deported. Under threat of “confiscation of property and banishment to the front,” the soviet forbade drunkenness in the streets. The threat was more than once carried into action.”(pg.441)
Of course, the capitalist press at the time tried to slander the soviet, according to them the Kronstadters were “…plundering state property, the women are nationalised(!), robberies and drunken orgies are in progress.”(pg.443) The big contrast here is apparantent, as if the farcical nature of what is being suggested by these newspapers.

The main problem for the dual-power government at the time (the Provisional government and the Soviet ‘executive’) was that eighty officers had been arrested. The government suggested that they were being kept in appalling conditions. Trotsky quotes their appeal as follows “The officers, gendarmes and police arrested by us in the days of the revolution have themselves declared to representatives of the government that they have nothing to complain of in the treatment they have received from the prison management. It is true that the prison buildings of Kronstadt are horrible, but those are the same prisons which were built by czarism for us. We haven’t any others. And if we keep the enemies of the people in those prisons it is not out of vengeance, but from considerations of revolutionary self-preservation.”(pg.442)
In summary, the officers were arrested for purposes of incapacitation are kept in whatever facilities were available. But given that these arrested officers had put down an uprising in 1906 with mass shootings and drownings.

As ever, I much prefer the justice of the oppressed to that of the oppressors.

Crime and the 1923 German Revolution

As I have said before, for a Marxist criminology we cannot just be content in analysising crime in the here and now, we must also examine what would happen to crime during and after a successful socialist revolution. This is what I am trying to do once more here. The conclusions I draw in this piece are based upon reading Witness to the German Revolution by Victor Serge.

What was crime like in Germany during 1923 – soaring! And it should be no surprise – the German economy was collapsing under the weight of reparations from the Versailles Treaty, France was occupying the Ruhr, inflation was spiralling out of control, there was also food shortages. Thus it wouldn’t surprise you that Serge reports “A hundred or so cases of poisoning from bad flour…and several cases involving rotten horse meat. There have been several deaths.”(pg26), he also reports a increase of a homelessness of a third in a year and troops killing people in the occupied Ruhr.

On July 27th he notes of how a potato seller increasing his prices every time someone bought them (there was a shortage of potatoes) was set upon by an angry crowd. On September 22nd he reports how hoarding food has led to the looting of shops.

On 13th October he reports on the case of a Prussian landlord who had assaulted, battered and finally killed peasants scavenging for wood and wild mushrooms on his land over a period of time. Defending himself saying “I don’t shoot at respectable people, but I am not afraid of shooting at scum.”(pg104), Serge reports that he was acquitted.

20th October see Serge reporting that “Hunger riots are becoming daily events.”(pg118) Interestingly, on 27th October Serge reports that “An eyewitness told me about one of these instances of looting. He was astonished at the sense of order of the starving people. Methodical looting, no unnecessary violence against property or people. They didn’t take luxury items. They took bread, fat, shoes. Suddenly achieving a primitive awareness of their right to life, men condemned to die of hunger took what they needed to live. It was only when the police intervened that the expropriation degenerated into a riot.”(pg.127) Interestingly in a later article he compares this ‘non-violent’ crime of working people with that of the capitalist class, the police and the Nazis who had attacked and threatened workers and Socialists all across the country.

What Serge’s comments do show is the material causes of crime – in this case the spiralling inflation causing hunger and leading people to looting in order to stay alive. Sure the link is never so directly causal when it not in times of capitalist crisis, but then there is nothing like a crisis to exposure the real nature of the system.

More of the Same Proposals on Crime

Monday, 16th June saw a ‘new’ set of proposals to reorganise the criminal justice system to tackle crime. Included this time are proposals to ‘toughen up’ community service by renaming it ‘community payback’ (it was renamed unpaid work not that long ago too!), forcing offenders to wear bright yellow bibs.
To give it that extra New Labour touch, in common with almost every new piece of policy, the probation service is going to be forced to contract the provision of this out.
Other proposals include giving more powers to Police Community Support Officers so they can detain people and hand out on the spot fines. Also included in the proposals are the idea of putting up posters of those convicted (to ‘name and shame’ them) as well as appointing a commissioner to the sentencing guidance council to ‘represent the public’ – the very fact this proposal is there shows how out of touch the government is with ordinary people.

Socialist Approach Needed

Fundamentally, the proposals offer nothing new, they are just another set of suggestions to make New Labour appear ‘tough on crime’. It is an incredibly slight change in style and contains no new substance at all. The whole approach of New Labour, along with the other major capitalist parties is to attack the symptoms of the problem and not the real cause – the capitalist system that they seek to defend.
As capitalism is going into recession in Britain then these problems will only get worse – unemployment will increase, big business will tighten the screws on wages and conditions for those who remain in work. If young people (and many other people for that matter) thought the future was grim over the last few years, under capitalism it will get a whole lot worse.
In response to the bleak future of the profit system, socialists argue for a society that meets people’s needs. Affordable, quality housing, well-paid jobs, provision of activities and youth centres for young people would all undermine the economic basis for widespread crime that capitalism’s deepening crisis is providing.
But this is not all socialists propose. Instead of appointing out of touch people to represent ordinary people, socialists suggest practical measures to fight crime such as democratic control of local policing so that the local community can tackle the problems that it feels most threatened by, functioning within a democratically organised criminal justice system. Then instead of having to rely on ever tougher gimmicks to prove to the public that something is being done about crime, people can see through their own involvement what is being done and have a genuine input rather than being used as pawns by capitalist politicans to justify increasingly repressive laws.

George Monbiot on Prisons

An interesting piece from the Guardian a few days ago, which I thought i'd repost here - worth a good read as its is very well informed. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/24/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime

Crime is falling - but our obsession with locking people up keeps growing
Wealth, and the desire to preserve it, is what drives citizens of rich nations to demand an increasingly punitive justice system
George Monbiot
Tuesday June 24 2008
The Guardian

Which of these countries has the most prisoners per head of population? Sudan, Syria, China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, or England and Wales? We win, or rather lose: I have ranked these countries in reverse order. On this measure, England and Wales have a more punitive judicial system than most of the world's dictatorships.
On Friday, the government released new figures for the prison population. It broke all records, yet again. It has risen by 38% since Labour came to power, and now stands at 83,181. What does the government intend to do about it? Lock more people up. It is building enough new cells to jail 96,000 people by 2014. At the beginning of this month it laid out its plans for titan prisons: vast broiler units, which will each house 2,500 people. But they'll be only just big enough: the government expects the number of cons to rise to 95,600 in six years.
As ever, Britain appears to be chasing the United States. In both absolute and relative terms, the US's prison population is the highest on earth: 1% of its adult population is behind bars. This is five times our preposterous rate and six times Turkey's. It is over twice the rate of the nearest contender, South Africa. If you count the people under community supervision or on probation, the total rises to more than 7 million, or 3.1% of the adult population (all references are on my website). Black men who failed to complete high school in the US have a 60% chance of ending up in jail. I feel I need to say that again: 60% of unqualified African-American men go to prison. It's beginning to look as if the state has stopped imprisoning individuals and started locking up a social class. Is this what we aspire to?
To judge by the remonstrations of the tabloids, the answer is yes. But why? And why, in the United Kingdom, is imprisonment still rising? It's not because of rising crime. Last year crimes recorded by the police fell by 2%, while the most serious violent offences fell by 9%. Nor does it reflect the conviction rate. That fell by 4% in 2006 (we don't yet have last year's figures). Stranger still, it is not connected to the rate of imprisonment either, which fell by 9% between 2004 and 2006.
The prison population is rising for one reason: people are being put away for longer. Between 1997 and 2004, the average sentence rose from 15.7 months to 16.1. That tells only half the story: the actual time served rose as well, as a result of new laws the government introduced in 1998 and 2003. In 2004 the courts started handing down indeterminate sentences - prison terms without fixed limits. These will be partly responsible for the projected growth in imprisonment over the next six years.
This exposes a remarkable contradiction in government policy. At the beginning of last year, the criminal justice ministers sent a begging letter to the courts asking them not to bang so many people up, as the prisons were bursting. But they are bursting because of the mandatory life terms, indeterminate sentences and other stern measures policy has forced the judges to pass. In 2002, England and Wales had more lifers (5,268) than the rest of the European Union put together (5,046). I can't find a more recent comparison, and since the accession of the former communist states this is bound to have changed. But it gives you a rough idea of how weird this country is.
So why, when the number of crimes - especially serious violent crimes - is falling, are both the government and the courts imposing longer sentences? Why does the UK consistently rank in the top two places for imprisonment in western Europe? Why, as this country becomes more peaceable, does it become more punitive? I don't know. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. But one thing I've noticed is that many of the states with the highest number of convicts are also those with the greatest differential between rich and poor. Within the OECD nations, the US has the second highest rate of inequality. Mexico, which is the most unequal, has the third-highest rate of imprisonment. In the EU, four of the five most unequal nations also rank among the top five jailers. The correlation, though by no means exact, seems to apply across many of the rich countries.
This doesn't demonstrate a causal relationship. But there are three likely connections. The first is that inequality causes crime. This is what Anatole France referred to when he claimed to admire "the majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread". But, while this has proved true at most times and in most places, crime is falling in England and Wales while inequality is rising.
The second possible link is that prison causes inequality. The sociologist Bruce Western has shown that jail in the United States is a huge and hidden cause of deprivation. When people are locked up, they can't acquire the skills and social contacts they need to get on outside. Employers are reluctant to take them on when they've been released, and they tend to be hired by the day or to get stuck in the casual economy, which is one of the reasons why so many return to crime. Among whites and Hispanics, wages for ex-cons are severely depressed. Among black people the effect is less marked: the "stigma of imprisonment", Western suggests, appears to have stuck to the entire black underclass.
His groundbreaking research shows that US labour figures, which appeared to prove that the rising tide of the 1990s lifted all boats, were hopelessly skewed. The government's claim that the boom had enhanced everyone's job prospects - even those at the bottom of the heap - turns out to be an artefact of rising imprisonment: convicts aren't counted in household surveys. Western found that while general unemployment fell sharply in the 1990s, when prisoners were included, the rate among unqualified young black men rose to its highest level ever: a gobsmacking 65%.
The third possible reason for a link between the two factors is that inequality causes imprisonment. I can't prove this, and it is hard to see how anyone could do so. But my untested hypothesis runs as follows: the greater the wealth accrued by the top echelons, the more ferociously they demand protection from the rest of society. They have more to lose from crime and less to lose from punishment, which is less likely to strike the richer you become.
The people who help to generate the public demand for long prison terms (newspaper proprietors and editors) and the people who mete it out (judges and magistrates) are drawn overwhelmingly from the property-owning classes. "Those who have built large fortunes," Max Hastings, who was once the editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote of his former employer Conrad Black, "seldom lose their nervousness that some ill-wisher will find means to take their money away from them."
Money breeds paranoia, and paranoia keeps people in prison.

Review – A Benefit for the Victims of Violent Crime EP – Anti-Flag (2007)

For those disappointed by the lack of articles to do with crime recently, this is sort of for you. You may also be pleased to hear that I'm working on quite a few pieces over the next week or two for the blog on various things too.

This latest release by anti-war US punk band Anti-Flag is a compilation of songs recorded whilst recording their previous album as well as various live versions of songs from some of their previous albums. As is indicated by the album’s title, it was released to raise funds for a victim support centre in Pittsburgh, where the band is from, after the band wanted to do something positive after the murder of the sister of one of the band members (Most victim support and rape crisis centres are underfunded and generally have to rely on donations to survive). The very fact that their reaction was in this direction is entirely positive.
What is even better is that it is not just a re-hash of old songs with just re-recordings and live songs. Although there are a few live versions of songs from their last few albums – the live version of The Project for a New American Century is recommended, there are also a fair sprinkling of new songs too, the pick of which are No Paradise, No Future and Anthem for The New Millenium Generation not just musically, but for the political message that blames problems like crime on the capitalist system. The style of the songs is slightly different to some of their previous albums, and should have prepared me a bit more for their more recent album ‘The Bright Lights of America’. If you’re buying an Anti-Flag album, get the full albums first, but this is still recommended listening.

Harassing Young People

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has recently been heralding an initiative in Essex where officers harass ‘yobs’ by following young people around with video cameras. The Guardian recently published an article (30/05/08) written by one of their journalists who had spent a day with the ‘Operation Leopard’ police taskforce.
The journalist describes how the police roam the estate looking for a ‘hit list of individuals’, filming them and anyone they are with and occasionally visiting their homes. Apparently those filmed have the right not to be, but as with many ‘right’ that we don’t have when it suits the authorities, the journalist notes that this option wasn’t given to any of the 15 people filmed in his presence.
But one of the many problems of such ‘targeted’ police work is that it targets either stereotypically contrived sections of the population, or ‘known offenders’, the latter given only a tiny proportion of all crimes committed are ever arrested isn’t the ‘evidence-based’ approach its advocates make it out to be. But also, as a conversation the journalist has with a 19 year old target uncovers, just because someone has committed one or more crimes in the past, doesn’t mean they will do so in the future, indeed many people who have engaged in criminal or anti-social behaviour when they are young simply drop out of it later or ‘grow up’ as the 19 year old expresses it.
Many working class people rightly feel threatened by ‘street’ crime and anti-social behaviour, so it is perhaps understandable that many residents on the police’s survey supported the initiative believing the inconvenience of a dozen or so youths is worth it if crime is reduced. There are two problems with this though, firstly that saturation and intimidatory police tactics can often provoke a fierce backlash from the relatively powerless groups subjected to them. Secondly, there aren’t enough police officers to operate such schemes everywhere, and given that it doesn’t remove the underlying causes of such actions, as many residents themselves expressed, once the operation leaves the estate crime and anti-social behaviour will probably increase again.
Socialists do support the use of policing to tackle crime, but only under local democratic control and we would favour a more reactive use rather than proactively harassing people, who often are completely innocent. But this would be as an auxiliary to tackling the problems at the root of crime, unemployment and alienation which give many young people no future under this current capitalist system.

Plaid and Crime

This is a review of Leanne Wood's recent Plaid Cymru policy statement 'Making Our Communities Safer' - which can be found at http://www.plaidcymru.org/uploads/publications/319.pdf. This has already been discussed on the Socialist Unity blog see http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=2324. This review can also be found on the Socialist Party Wales website.

A document by Plaid AM Leanne Wood

Reviewed by Iain Dalton (Bangor SP)

Crime has been ever more increasingly in the press over the last few years as one of the biggest issues affecting people. However, we have been fed a programme of populist, punitive schemes to combat crime by this New Labour government that have only made the problem worse. Thus it is welcome that Leanne Wood, a ‘left’ Assembly member for Plaid Cymru and former probation officer has written a document challenging these policies and attempting to outline an alternative policy for Plaid Cymru.

After the summary and recommendations, the report begins by stating “Community life in Wales is at risk. UK Government attacks on public services and the historic lack of a Welsh economic policy has meant that community viability has had to depend upon the whims of the market. Whilst there have been some winners, most communities and the people living within them have been losers.” Undoubtedly cuts to public services have had a dramatic impact across the UK and especially in Wales which to a great extent has not in some areas recovered from. But it is not just the UK government that is affecting these cuts, the Welsh Assembly and local councils have happily passed on budget cuts to cuts to services, despite moaning about it rather than taking practical steps to do something about it. For Wood, safe communities are the key to fighting crime, a safe community is one in which someone (and those they care about) can move around in free from fear.

Wood correctly points out the abject failure of current government policies to tackle crime. She points out that the imprisonment rate for the UK (I assume she means England and Wales as Scotland is a separate jurisdiction) 50% higher than France, Germany and Italy and that (much more shockingly in my opinion) 72% of the male prison population (the vast bulk of the prison population) have two or more mental health disorders. Wood also points of the re-offending rate and how this is linked to drug and alcohol dependency which is very prevalent among offenders.

Wood also comments on how sentences are increasing, pointing out the 34% increase in prison sentences for women for driving offences, and makes several other comments regarding female prisoners including the large proportion sentenced for drug offences and the ‘recycling’ of women through prison on short sentences that means no rehabilitation could possibly occur.

Wood also comments on how some aspects of crime policy, such as preventative elements related to housing, education, domestic abuse, youth justice etc. have been devolved to the Welsh Assembly, but control of policing, criminal law, the courts, probation and prisons remains with the new Ministry of Justice.

In criticizing the recent policy from the Home Office, she notes the admixture of free-market liberalism with punitivism and prohibition. We have seen in recent years the largest ever prison population, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) criminalizing young people, clamping down on civil liberties and the proposed ID cards. Alongside this we’ve seen drinking laws relaxed, the promotion of super casinos and the opening up of the probation service to privatization.

In trying to answer the question of why crime has become such a political issue she points out the contradiction between the declining crime rates and the ever increasing fear and perception of crime. She reviews the usual links between media portrayals of crime out of control, and points out that ‘anti-social behaviour’ was invented by New Labour, indeed much of their effort against crime has been directed at low level crime which only seems to have made the problem worse.

To do something about crime, Wood correctly argues that we have to understand why people commit crime. She briefly surveys things like poverty, substance abuse, lack of youth facilities and mental health problems, pointing out the shocking statistics relating to this including over half a million people in Wales living in poverty and the much greater prevalence of mental health problems in former coal mining areas.

Crime policy towards young people comes under severe criticism from Wood. She points out that because there is only one secure children’s home in Wales about 84% of young offenders from Wales are imprisoned in England. But it is ASBOs which come in for the most criticism (quite rightly!). As she explains ASBOs are not criminal offences, but their breaching can result in imprisonment, meaning that people are being sent to prison for offences that wouldn’t even warrant a fine or community service order! She cites figures from the Youth Justice Board showed that 700 children and young people had been imprisoned for ASBO breaches, and she also points out that figures show that about half of all ASBOs are breached.

So far so good. These criticisms of government policies are something socialists would agree with. But what does she propose? The main proposal is to make criminal justice issues fully devolved to the Welsh Assembly government, so that they can prioritise tackling the causes of crime. The bulk of the proposals lay in substituting the punitive approach of new labour for a rehabilitative approach, alongside a pro-active preventative approach with young people generally, and specific interventions for those who have committed criminal offences or anti-social behaviour. Of course, such an approach would be a big improvement on current government policies, but unfortunately it doesn’t tackle many of the real problems.

Poverty, substance abuse, mental health problems are by products of living in an alienating society based on greed rather than need. Wood’s proposals are attempting to deal with these damaging by products, rather than their root causes. No mention is made of trying to deal with the devastation caused to communities by multinationals that decide to leave for lower wage economies, nor the current financial squeeze which is being reinforced by below inflation public sector pay deals and an appallingly low minimum wage.

Further more, these solutions would not empower ordinary people to be able to do anything, rather create a whole layer of professionals who will control the lives of thousands. It is a recipe for a top-down system which would still fail to respond to the needs of ordinary people in Wales.

Instead, Socialists would start from the need for the democratic control of the whole criminal justice system so that priorities can be decided by local communities. We would also advocate the democratic control of the economy to provide well-paid jobs and employment for all. Of course, some of the suggestions that Wood makes would be incorporated into a socialist strategy to tackle crime, such as increased availability of facilities to help those with drug problems, but to be successful it would need to be linked to the key socialist policies stated above to have any real chance.

Crime & Venezuela

This is a letter I wrote that was published in this month's issue of Socialism Today, It related to this article from the February issue by Tony Saunois (see

http://www.socialismtoday.org/115/venezuela.html

)

In the recent article by Tony Saunois on Venezuela he correctly points out that the blight of crime in Venezuela “is a critical question”. Indeed many media reports in this country about Venezuela focus on crime in one form or another, whether it is reports of the murder rate in Caracas, the latest kidnapping or another prison riot. As Tony comments “Violent crime is now seen as a major issue as the government is seen as having failed to deal with it.”
Tony quotes murder rates in Caracas of 33.2 per 100,000, with eleven murders a day in Caracas in November 2007. Indeed the figures Tony quotes shows that Venezuela is one of the most murderous countries in the world. According to figures from the 7th United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (using figures collected between 1998 and 2000), Venezuela came 7th out of 62 countries in total numbers of crimes, lower than the United States, Mexico, South Africa, Colombia, Russia and India. However, several of those countries have much larger populations than Venezuela (as Tony notes in the article per 100,000 people the US murder rate in 2000 was 5.51 much lower than Venezuela).
However, in terms of crime (in general) per 1000 people, Venezeula ranks 46 out of 60 with 9.3 per 1000, whereas the UK, USA, South Africa, Germany and Chile have much higher rates (85.6, 80.1, 77.2, 76.0 and 88.2 per 1000 respectively). Crime figures are often not brilliantly reliable, because not only do they reflect the actual crime rate, but they are also a product of each countries different classifications of crime, the reporting rate of crime, decisions on what crimes to record etc. Also, one crime type may be much more prevalent than the general rate (ie in Venezuela murder and serious violent crimes like kidnapping), which may skew or not the figures. Murder however tends to be well reported (if not only for the seriousness of the crime, then also the fact it can be cross-checked with other data including hospitals admissions etc.)
After the short discussion of crime rates, Tony then comments that “Some may argue that it is unfair to blame Chavez for the high levels of crime”. Indeed Chavez inherited a legacy of crime and corruption on assuming the Presidency from previous pillaging capitalist rulers. The high murder rate, rampant prison overcrowding and other problems were just one part of that legacy. Tony also points out that crime is a product of social conditions, in particular poverty and alienation. Some of the proposals in the defeated referendum would have alleviated these to an extent, particularly the reduction of the working week, as have other previous reforms. Those reforms have, as Tony notes, been financed on the back of high oil prices and economic growth. The coming world recession places these reforms in jeopardy as is mentioned later in the article. Chavez has failed to nationalise most of the decisive sectors of the economy, which have been giving bonanza profits to the Venezuelan capitalists. Only through the nationalisation of these sectors of the economy, under democratic working class control can these resources be fully utilised to eradicate poverty and moreover stop capitalist disruption of the Venezuelan life, such as the current food shortages.
However, as is discussed in the article, Socialists do not stand back and do nothing in the meantime; instead we believe that “it is necessary for the worker’s movement to take it [the crime question] up in a practical way”. The article discusses the corruption prevalent in the Venezuelan police, but the demands made by Marxists in relation to the state are applicable not just to the police but all sections of the criminal justice system. It is no good for the police to arrest, for example, some fascist thugs, for the thug to be unconditionally released by the courts which are dominated by the usually conservative judiciary. Similarly, there is not much point in letting those convicted of crimes simply rot away and become even more brutalised in overcrowded jails. The whole criminal justice system needs to be taken under the democratic control of the community, with full trade union rights for the workers within it.
As is mentioned in the article, the creation of an organised movement of the working class and poor is crucial. Only this, armed with a socialist programme can guarantee the victory of the Venezuelan revolution and lead a real fight to rid Venezuelan revolution and lead the real fight to rid Venezuela of it’s blight of violent crime.

Definitions of Criminality – Some Thoughts from Steven Box

At the moment I’m currently reading Power, Crime and Mystification by Steven Box. It’s a book all to do with State and Corporate crimes, and has so far been an interesting read. What I wish to comment here is on something I’ve reflected upon in my Draft Principles of a Marxist Criminology, which he considers in the first chapter of the book.

Why are some behaviours criminalised and others not? This has been a fairly central question in criminology. Box discusses some of the ideas why this is so. He first picks up on the view that criminal law is a tool of the ruling class and thus flowing from that – what is criminalised are ‘…problem populations perceived by the powerful to be potentially or actually threatening the existing distribution of power, wealth and privilege.’(pg.7)

But as Box notes, this isn’t the whole story – as I have previously commentated it is not the case that ‘…all criminal laws directly express the interests of one particular group, such as the ruling class. Clearly some legislation reflects temporary victories of one interest or allied interest groups over others, and none of these may be identical or coincide with the interests of the ruling class’, however, Box also argues that ‘…these victories are short lived. Powerful groups have ways and means of clawing back the spoils of tactical defeats.’(pg.8)

Box also notes that in a sense many laws are ‘in all our interests’ as nobody wants to be a victim of serious crime. However, Box notes this is not the whole picture. Taking murder – he points out that this basically is avoidable killings. However, there are many other types of avoidable killing – such as unsafe working conditions etc. As Box notes ‘We are encouraged to see murder as a particular act involving a very limited range of stereotypical actors, instruments, situations, and motives. Other types of avoidable killing are either defined as a less serious crime than murder, or as matters more appropriate for administrative or civil proceedings…’(pg.9) As Box goes on to note, the people who commit legally defined murder are usually poorer and less powerful than those who commit mere avoidable killings.

He goes onto show how this relates to theft, sexual crimes, assault and terrorism and concludes ‘Thus criminal laws against murder, rape, robbery, and assault do protect us all, but they do not protect us equally.’(pg.11) I’m inclined to agree with Box, in the conclusions he draws as a consequence of this operation of the criminal law, which are

1) Less privileged people are more likely to be arrested and punished
2) The illusion is created that those people are also the most dangerous in society
3) It helps disguise the fact that the powerful create the conditions for the offending of the powerless
4) It makes the criminal justice system look like a neutral arbiter –above everything.
5) Makes people dependent on the criminal justice system and hence the state for protection, even though this body is likely to make the problems worse

The only thing I don’t like is the looseness of the terms powerful, powerless and privileged, but the general thrust of this I think is in line with things I have commented on previously.

Lying About Crime

This week the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London published a paper entitled Critical Thinking About Uses of Research by Tim Hope and Reece Walters. This piece draws on that paper. One thing I haven’t mentioned in my report is the call by in the paper by Reece Walters to boycott Home Office Research

One of the things that the New Labour government has hyped up in criminal justice has been that it will try and used evidence based research to guide it’s policies. After heavy doses of new right ‘prison works’ style-measures, the idea was to use measures that actually do something to reduce or prevent crime. Yet, here they have distorted facts just as they have done in many other realms.

68 per cent of the Home Office research budget is directed towards studying crime and criminal justice. That’s £46.6million! During this period, the then Home Secretary, John Reid organised a pause of publication of research findings and then subsequently declared the department not fit for purpose and split it into two.
In Walters’ piece he discusses how the government has talked about ‘listening’ to academic research on issues but describes several occasions when senior researchers at the RDS (the Research Development and Statistics Directorate of the Home Office) spoke to conferences about government policy and ignored any critical comments made on this policy.
Walter’s also discusses the problems with the Home Office’s research agenda. It is very limited, as Walters says, ‘Any credible independent research that is likely to shed a negative or critical light on the policies and practices of government will not be procured, funded, published or even debated by the Home Office.’(pg.14) This is even more worrying as the RDS commissions the majority of criminological research in this country and is the single largest employer of criminologists.
The subjects investigated are limited – indeed given its place as biggest commissioner of research it sets the trend for the limited horizons that official criminology has. Human rights violations, corporate crime, miscarriages of justice are not investigated at all. Walters also notes that the RDS tends to employ psychology, economics and physics graduates rather than sociological and criminological graduates. This serves to reinforce the skewed nature of Home Office research that, as Walters alleges, serves merely to support existing government policy.
Walters also discusses a piece of research he was commissioned as part of a team to do for the Scottish Executive. When their report was used by the Executive only to highlight the most positive features, they published a critical journal article which led to a backlash at them with funding cuts and pressure put upon the institution to take disciplinary action against them.

The second piece is a more technical piece about Home Office use of peer-review methods. Hope first explains what peer-review is and then discusses the closed nature of Home Office peer-reviews, which ultimately screens their methods of selecting what research they will publish. Hope discusses how research pieces that did not agree with the policy direction of the Home Office, even though peer reviews found them to be good pieces of work, were subsequently not published.
Both authors conclude that repression of critical research is a bad thing. I heartily agree – well written and argued criticism is to welcomed as it helps us to refine our ideas and understanding of events. But politics and knowledge cannot be separated. As the authors show a particular type of politics breeds its own false knowledge about the world. Walters argues for counter-hegemonic research, but there is still the question of where the funding comes from this research. I think funding for research of that kind will be to some extent dependent on the correlation of political forces in society. The neo-liberal ideology needs to be held to account politically, and for this purpose critical research will need to feed into a political alternative.

Environmental Crime

This piece is a look at an article ‘Politics, economy and Environmental Crime’ by Reece Walters on this issue from the Winter 07/08 issue of Criminal Justice Matters.

The idea of environmental crime is a relatively new one and it’s use in official circles far from captures the entirety of the concept. For Walters (and for myself) such a term would encompass “…the destruction of natural habitats and pollution of oceans, waterways and airways…” However, for the Home Office, as Walters points out, it covers things individuals may do such as Fly-tipping, Littering, Grafitti and Vandalism. Now it might just be me, but the actions described there don’t cover the entirety or even most of the former – in a similar way to climate change been tackled by individuals switching off the lights, this attempts to tackle environmental destruction by stopping littering (which is not to say that you should leave the lights on or litter). Why is this so? As Walters points out, the problem of environmental crime as she would define it is not really seen as a crime for the government or multi-national corporations, it’s more of a necessary by-product of making profits.
Walters does point out that the government has defined a term of ‘corporate environmental crime’, but this doesn’t include important transnational offences such as trading in endangered species, illegal waste dumping, deforestation etc.
Walters then goes on to site some examples of corporate environmental crime including the non-payment of tax by corporation, that 3.2 million cubic metres of timber sold in the UK is from protected woodland areas, at least 12,000 tons of illegally fished fish is imported into Britain each year, the nuclear industry has illegally disposed of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste in the Channel Islands and so on.
Her conclusion is somewhat lacking – she correctly points out that the needs of ‘fiscal prosperity’ dominate over those of sustainability – but goes no further than this. I would suggest a few things, firstly that part of the reason why environmental destruction is easy for these bodies is because they do not have to live with the consequences. I do not mean exclusively in terms of global warming where the severest impacts will happen years down the line as feedback effects continually increase, but in terms of physically living with the destruction – the advantages of being a multinational corporation mean that you can exploit anywhere around the world and you only have to live in one part of it. The second point is that tougher environmental laws – which Walters may or may not be suggesting – won’t solve the problem, as Walters illustrates with the sheer amount of already existing laws that get broken.
The solution to the problem of corporate environmental crime is putting these multinationals under the democratic control of the working class – with representatives from workers within the company and from the general community. These representatives would have a much greater stake in stopping environmental destruction than those who are only interested in profits.

Carnival of Socialism #20

Hi all, Welcome to Carnival of Socialsim 20 - focussing on crime, criminal justice and socialism. Just like Power to the People with the previous carnival attempt to open people's eyes to internationalism and liberation, I'm intending on doing a similar thing with this topic, however, some of these posts are a little old, but i include them becuase I think they're quite good.

So let's begin

Crime is a relatively under discussed subject on the left - Indeed it's even seen as a weakness, but that shouldn't be so - given the high levels of crime in many places around the world (especially advanced capitalist countries) and the expensive measures used in the attempt to combat this (ie. prison) - this really shouldn't be the case. In this Carnival, we'll look at various aspects of crime from how socialists should approach crime, to criticising capitalist methods of tackling crime to crime in the third world.

Socialists and Crime

For those who haven't been on this blog before one of my pet projects has been coming up with some principles for a Marxist Approach to Criminology. This got quite a good response, and even got a post in response on Law and Disorder. I've recently revisited the issue and plan to do so again. But it's worth thinking about.
Jack Ray also discussed the left and crime in this post and what attitude we should take towards petty crime.


The Police

Obviously an issue that got talked about a lot in the last few months was the police going on strike. Karl Marx Strasse posted with a view from Germany on the situation. Ten Percent has been reporting on the taser trial in the North Wales Police force.

Prisons

I've had a series of posts on the prison crisis in Britain, the latest being Prisons: Lumbering into Further Crisis.
A while ago, AVPS posted reviewing a Loius Theroux programme on prisons that opened some interesting debates on prisons in the US. Whilst JimJay at The Daily (maybe) posted this recently on foreign prisoners.
The issue of women and young people in prisons and deaths in prisons have been taken up admirably by Louise at Socialist Unity, one of her most recent postings been on restraint of young prisoners. However, I'd urge you to check out the previous articles (of which there are many) in the archive of that blog.
Also, Honorary Proletarian has been posting irregularly for a while now on the detention of immigrants.

Discrimination

There is a heavy race bias in many criminal justice systems. Rise, Resist Revolt took this up in January this year in relation to blacks in the USA. Stroppyblog features a repost of Peter Tatchell's comments on George Galloway's slanders on an Iranian asylum seeker which reveals interesting stuff about gay right and Iran.
There's also a post on aboriginal rights at The Red Wombat Hole.

Human Rights

There's also the question of human rights in general. A crime can be to some extent defined as something that violates those rights. A week or so ago I mused on this problem - The Question of Human Rights. One of the conclusions was that capitalism can't guarantee these rights, a point that Power to the People takes up in relation to South Africa.
Ian's Red Log had a recent post on workplace safety.
I've been debating where to put this piece by JimJay on ASBO's but i think it fits in with these articles the best, as they basically circumvent existing criminal justice.

International Justice and Law

I've recently posted on Truth Commissions and International Justice, but to spell out what these crimes are in practice, take a look at landsker's post on the my lai massacre.
There's also a short post on Argentine crimes against humanity under the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance from the Left News Network, whilst Rebellion Sucks! reports on Venezuela's victory in the courts, Socialist Unity also had another repost on this too.
Finally for this section, a while back Politics in Pieces blogged on the resurgance of whaling (through getting round the law by claiming that it is for research purposes).

Terrorism

A while ago now, Renegade Eye posted on individual terrorism in Nigeria. I also recently posted on how criminologists view terrorism.
From Socialist Unity Blog, Andy Newman recently posted on a meeting about Defending Civil Liberties, whilst Louise has been taking a deeper look into the upcoming counter-terrorism bill. Law and Disorder also had a not too recent post on detention and terrorism.
And on a much weirder note, take a look at what The Nation of Duncan received in the post.

Drink, Drugs and Roads

A while ago I posted on the question of alcoholism, importantly as binge drinking is in the press a hell of a lot here. Further Left Forum has also posted recently on the Use of the Coca Leaf in Bolvia Whilst Andy Newman posted on road safety and the amount of fatal accidents that occur on the roads. JimJay also had a post about a suprising sentence for a drinking and driving offence.

Crime and Revolution

Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person who I can find that's blogged about crime during the russian revolution. It's a shame, but it's something I'd love to see someone else take up (or in relation to any other working class revolution).

Well, that took longer than I thought it would to put together. I apologise for the fact that some blogs (including my own) have been up many times, but unfortunately (at least from my perspective) these issues aren't taken up enough. Hopefully this carnival will do something about that.

Crime in the Soviet Union

This piece is a look at W. E. Butler’s article of the same title in the Spring 1992 British Journal of Criminology.

Discussing crime and the Soviet Union is quite a difficult proposition. Why? Because crime stats which are often the guide for discussing crime in many countries, and in the Soviet Union these were not available for many years. Butler, who has written the article under discussion is from his tone clearly no Marxist, and to that extent is ignorant of the difference between the first few years of the Russian Revolution and it’s development thereafter. Even so, he does comment that in the early years “it is certainly the case that data on the incidence of reported crime, criminal convictions, and sentencing policies were reported and discussed in the press and cumulated in annual statistical yearbooks”(pg.146). However, “from the early 1930s the reporting of this type of ‘negative phenomena’ was prohibited on grounds of official secrecy”(pg.146). He mainly puts this down to “the obvious ideological inconsistency between the declared achievement of socialism by Soviet society and the continued pervasiveness of criminality.”(p146). Obviously, decreeing socialism like Stalin did has nothing in common with real marxism and won’t make crime disappear. But Butler treats this as part of the development of communism rather than spotting the absolute break with marxism that Stalin’s coming to power represented.
One final point on this. Butler also says “Crime by definition was expected to die out, to disappear, under socialism and communism” (pg.146); this isn’t true. Marxists have always said that crime would be near negligible in a genuine communistic society – Lenin even discussed how crime would be dealth with to an extent in his State and Revolution.

The main piece of Butler’s analysis is of crime rates in the last few years of the Soviet Union (from 1987-89). He comments that “The year 1989 was by all accounts a deplorable one… registered crimes had increased by 31.8 per cent over 1988…”(pg.148) He also a bit later discusses the main decrease being in what he terms ‘economic crimes’, suggesting that this is because “the constituent elements of those offences were not consistent with the market economy ethos”.(pg.148) I would argue it is because the are all too consistent with the market that they simply stopped being investigated.

In the data on crimes, Russia and Ukraine within the USSR accounted for usually between 75 and 85 per cent of all crime. Somewhat surprisingly “Only 1-2 per cent of crimes in the USSR are classified as narcotics related.”(pg.154), however as if to make up for this “About one-third of all criminals acted in a state of intoxication…”(pg.155)
However, interestingly for us, he concludes the article with the following comment “Preliminary data released for 1990 showed a still rising crime rate: 2,786,605 crimes were committed, a 13.2 per cent increase over 1989.”(pg.159)

This is only a brief overview of the contents of this article which includes some more fascinating statistical data on crime rates in the various constituent parts of the USSR as well as who committed the crimes as well as some more commentary. Hopefully, I will be able to look again at Russia and the USSR in the near future. In particular interest to myself is both the transition from (well from semi-feudalism really!) and back to capitalism in that country. I would appreciate comments on this piece a lot, as I don't get many chances to talk about these issues.

Principles of a Marxist Approach to Criminology (Second Draft)

I will be away this weekend at the Socialist Party Wales Conference in Swansea, so my next post won't probably be until Monday.

Okay, thanks for responses on the previous post, it’s been quite helpful. Below I’ve tried to reformulate the various principles and I’ve also added some that I missed off before. Hopefully you should be able to see I’ve tried to tackle some of these to a great or lesser extent over the past year or so.

1) There should be no seperate marxist theory of crime, rather marxist theory is applied to it. For example we would explain the aetiology (cause) of crime through ideas such as alienation, relative deprivation or as the normal workings of the capitalist system rather than any special causal mechanism.

2) Crime and criminal justice system should be understood in a criminal historical materialist context, we should look at their development to their present conditions. Allied to this would be an understanding that the economic context of a situation would have an impact on what types of crime are prevalent and how these will be responded to.

3) A marxist approach is moreover a class approach and sees crime to an extent as an expression of the conflict between classes in society. This is important in several important ways. Firstly, the ruling class in any each will have more power to define what is crime and to manage responses to crime in their interest. Secondly, crime disprortionately affects the working class, and they are disproportionately punished for this.

4) A marxist approach is also an internationalist approach. We should understand crime ot just in one country, but across the increasingly globalised world.

5) We should attempt to understand the effect of crime and the operation of the criminal justice system, not just on the working class, but on the rest of the oppressed layers in society.

6) As well as studying crime in ‘normal’ capitalist society, we should also seek to study what happened to crime and criminal justice during revolutionary periods and also in states that have claimed to be socialist.

7) The role of the state, which the criminal justice system is part of needs to be examined thoroughly. It’s contradictory aims of upholding the rule of capitalism but also in having to legitimate itself through doing something about crime needs to be explored.

8) We should seek to review how the workers movement has addressed the question in the past, as well as various intellectuals who have tried to put across arguments from a similar perspective (ie. Foucault, Jock Young etc.)

9) As Marx says in his theses on Feuerbach, "Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world, point is to change it". We should analyse crime and the criminal justice system from the point of the working class. We should put forward ideas of how a socialist/communist society would aim to solve these problems, and fight for these to be adopted.

Utopia or Reality? Can we create the Perfect Criminal Justice System?

This was an essay I had to submit for my course on the criminal justice system, I post it here because it raises several things I discussed in my post Draft Prinicples of a Marxist Criminology and should be of interest to all readers ps. there's more after the references

Is there such a thing as a perfect criminal justice system and, moreover, what would such a criminal justice system look like? In this essay we will examine these questions. We shall first discuss what a criminal justice system is, before contemplating what the aim and purpose of a criminal justice system is. We will then discuss if and how these systems may be perfected, before discussing the implications of this on individual branches of the criminal justice system and concluding the essay.
The first question that we are presented with is that of definition, what is a criminal justice system? The Sage Dictionary of Criminology (2001:66) defines Criminal Justice as “The process through which the state responds to behaviour that it deems unacceptable. Criminal justice is delivered through a series of stages: charge, prosecution, trial; sentence; appeal; punishment. These processes and the agencies which carry them out are referred to collectively as the criminal justice system”. Cavadino & Dignan (2002:1) note that the criminal justice system consist of the “police, prosecution authorities and courts” in addition to the penal system “the system that exists to punish and otherwise deal with people that have (usually) been convicted of a criminal offence” (most importantly the prison and probation services).
The entry in the Sage Dictionary of Criminology later states “… crime control, or crime reduction, is obviously the overall aim of criminal justice…” (2001:67). But this answer does not yet solve our question; instead we must ask what would the aim and purpose be of a perfect criminal justice system? Given as we have seen crime control and crime reduction are the aims of a criminal justice system, then a perfect criminal justice system would reduce crime to non-existence. However, such an aim is quite contradictory; if such an aim was achieved there would be no need for a criminal justice system to exist any more as there would be no further criminal offending. Here we have our answer, the perfect criminal justice exists when it has served its purpose, when it is no longer necessary and thus no longer exists.
If we consider Lenin’s (1987) notion with regards to the state as a whole withering away when it is of no further use, then the idea of a criminal justice system ceasing to exist when crime is no longer occurring is very similar. In discussing democracy in the state Lenin (1987:339) says “… the more complete it is the more quickly it will become unnecessary…”, we could similarly say the more complete and effective a criminal justice system is in reducing crime (by lowering recidivism for example), the less need there is for it.
One may ask how relevant it is to be talking about the state in relation to the criminal justice system. As Taaffe et al. (1983:25-6) point out that “In the last analysis – as Marx, Engels and Lenin pointed out - the state consists of armed bodies of men and their material appendages ie. prisons etc.” Are not these the main constituents of the criminal justice system – the police and prisons – alongside the judiciary?
It would also be wrong to consider Lenin’s argument on the withering away of the state without noting that there is another criminological tendency which posits the lack of or severe reduction of a criminal justice system. Abolitionism to some would seem a not too dissimilar approach to the one just outlined above. Indeed, in an article outlining the relationship of abolitionism to crime control, Willem de Haan talks of “popular or socialist forms of penality” (de Haan, 1991:214), and the abolition “of the repressive capitalist system part by part or step by step” (de Haan, 1991:213).
However, abolitionism, according to de Haan, (1991:203) “is based on the moral conviction that social life should not and, in fact, cannot be regulated effectively by criminal law and that, therefore, the role of the criminal justice system should be drastically reduced while other ways of dealing with problematic situations, behaviours and events are being developed and put into practice.” Unlike the Marxism of Lenin, its starting point is not class struggle that necessitates the abolition of capitalist relations of production, but moral conviction instead. Whereas the eventual ‘withering away’ of the state and criminal justice system is only possible in a post-capitalist situation for Lenin, Abolitionists want the criminal justice system gone without any pre-conditions.
This difference then leads on to differences of a more practical nature. As de Haan (1991:207) goes on to state “…the criminal justice system is part of the crime problem rather than its solution… Therefore there is no point in trying to make the criminal justice system more effective or more just.” And later “Instead of the panacea which the criminal justice system pretends to provide for problems of crime control, abolitionism seeks to remedy social problems… Abolitionism assumes that social problems or conflicts are unavoidable as they are inherent to social life…” (de Haan, 1991:211) In contrast, as Taaffe et al. (1983:14) point out “It would be absurd for socialists in present day society to stand aside and declare that we cannot support the police in taking action to prevent crime and arrest criminals.” However, Marxists would agree that social problems need remedying too, and it is to this that we now turn.
As Jock Young (1981) discusses, aetiology, or the causes of crime is a pivotal issue in criminology and in how one deals with crime. This is influential, because as he exposes “If, for instance, we view crime as a voluntary act of the individual, we would tend towards a policy of punishing him or her, whereas, if she/he is seen as acting under the compulsion of individual or social forces, the treatment of the criminal might seem to be inappropriate.” (Young, 1981:252)
Indeed, Lenin (1987:340) suggests that with the removal of “the fundamental social cause of excesses”, which he holds to be “the exploitation of the masses, their want and their poverty”, “excesses will inevitably begin to “wither away”… with their withering away, the state (or in our case the criminal justice system) will also wither away”.
From this passage we can see that Lenin suggests two main causes of crime (or excesses); ‘want and poverty’ (deprivation/relative deprivation) as well as ‘exploitation of the masses’ (alienation). These factors are not new, indeed, Lenin being a Marxist drew these concepts from Marx, who exposed them several times in his works, most accessibly in Wage, Labour and Capital (Marx, 1996).
Marx’s theory of alienation can be summed up nicely in the sentences “… the exercise of labour power, labour is the worker’s own life activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labour as a part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life.” (Marx, 1996:25) Sell (2006:28) adds to this by commenting “Instead of making life easier, the increase in automation has reduced ever more jobs to mind-numbing repetition and boredom”.
Marx’s explanation of relative deprivation is similarly summed up well by his words “A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only very slight or no demands to make; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilisation, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.” (Marx, 1996:39) He concludes, “Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.” (Marx, 1996:39)
But how does this relate to crime? Sell (2006:30) argues that “The result [of increases in alienation and relative deprivation] has been an increase in street crime and robbery, almost all of it carried out against people who are also living in poverty. There is an increase in drug addiction… The reasons for drug use are wide and varied. Nonetheless, the increase in drug addiction and dependency, both legal and illegal, is primarily the result of a more alienated society.”
She goes on to illustrate this, pointing out “…the experience of the ex-mining villages around the country… the closure of the pits have left previously strong communities suffering the ravages of unemployment, poverty and drug addiction.” (Sell, 2006:30)
Young (1991:154) correctly states that based on this “To reduce crime we must reduce relative deprivation by ensuring meaningful work is provided at fair wages, by providing decent housing in which people are proud to live in, by ensuring that leisure facilities are available on a universal basis…”
However, as Taylor (1981:79) recognises “A welfare state which works on the principle that woman is naturally dependent on man and also currently depends on the expulsion of large numbers of youths into worklessness is not meeting the real needs of women and young people to be self-generating members of the human species.” The problem being that attempting to solve the problem of relative deprivation via a redistributive welfare state doesn’t solve the problem of alienation. It, as Taylor (1981) later notes adds because this is carried out by a layer of professionals which he argues act in lieu of people, rather than under their control.
Engels (1971:32) similarly discusses how “Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labour. But these organs, at whose head is the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society.”
To overcome alienation, it is necessary to overcome the fact that most people have no control over a large portion of their life, whether in the workplace, or outside it. Taylor (1981:101) argues that a “thoroughgoing democratisation” is necessary for these interests to be met. What would this look like you may ask?
Engels (1971:33) commenting on the Paris Commune suggests that “In the first place it filled all posts – administrative, judicial and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers… In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up…”
As Johnstone (2000) points out there are critics who would suggest that such a manner of operation of society as a whole, and the criminal justice system in particular, could not operate. Johnstone (2000:165) goes on to explain “even if it were concluded that today there is widespread and increasing support for a less tolerant and more punitive penal policy, it would not follow that increased public participation in the making of penal policy would automatically result in a harsher penal system.”
He continues “With regard to penal policy, the suggestion that people should be excluded from its making because they do not have the necessary qualities – such as knowledge, active interest and restraint – is easily countered. Through participation in making penal policy, people will develop these qualities. To the extent that they lack such qualities, this is due precisely to the over-centralization and over-professionalization of governance in general and penal policy making in particular. As decisions about the use of the social power to punish are historically removed from ordinary people and placed in the hands of a small elite, people lose the attributes required to make those decisions well. The only way they can recover these qualities is by having these decisions returned to them.” (Johnstone, 2000:158)
And tying this back in with the ideas developed so far, Lenin (1987:339) comments “…the diffusion of democracy among such an overwhelming majority of the population [means] that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear”, by special machine Lenin means the state (or for our purposes the criminal justice system). Of course such a thing will not happen overnight, as Lenin (1987:334) notes “there can be no question of defining the exact moment of the future withering away – the more so since it must obviously be a rather lengthy process”. Greater and greater participation can only come with time being freed from other areas; in particular the working day must be gradually shortened to allow for “removing the antithesis between mental and physical labor” (Lenin, 1987:344). Additionally, other institutions outside the criminal justice system would also be used to help in this process, most notably the media and the education system would be inherently useful to help people become more informed about crime and the criminal justice system.
As mentioned above, informed journalism could play a role in this. Wacquant (2007:39) gives us an example of how this may look “A rational public debate on crime would differentiate between offences and rigorously measure their incidence and effects. It would eschew the short-term perspective and emotional cast of daily journalism to make a clear cut differentiation between blips and groundswells, incidental variations from year-to-year and long-term trends. It would not confuse the rising fear of crime, intolerance of crime, or concern over crime with an increase in law-breaking itself.”
However, as Feilzer & Young (2006) demonstrate, such journalism cannot be limited to just one columnist in one newspaper. It must become a standard for newspapers and other media to place crimes in their social context, and to be written in a manner that explains the processes behind the topic being reported on. A basic grasp of the workings of the criminal justice system taught to all school pupils would also assist in this manner.
Now that we have a brief outline of what is necessary to achieve such a state of the criminal justice system, it is perhaps worth looking at what the first steps towards this may be in each of it’s branches. Although the comments here are focussed on the Criminal Justice System in England and Wales, the general thrust should be applicable to a greater or lesser extent in other countries too.
Policing is perhaps the most visible part of the criminal justice system. For our purposes it is perhaps useful to look in particular at the disputes in the early 1980’s to do with the accountability of the police. This centred around several issues, from the 1980 Police Authorities (Powers) Bill proposed by Jack Straw MP, the inner city riots of 1980 and 1981 (particularly in Toxteth and Brixton) and conflicts over the role of police authorities, and later the deployment of the police during the 1984-5 miner’s strike (Scraton, 1985).
The link between all these issues was the attempt to subordinate the priorities of local policing to the wishes of the local populace. Kinsey et al. (1986) argue that police are dependent upon the local community for information to help them apprehend offenders and that the pursuance of policy contrary to the wishes of the community (such as operations like Swamp 81 which provoked the 1981 Brixton riots) merely serve to alienate the community further from the police, and thus reducing this flow of information. As they note “People have little incentive to participate in a process over which they have little control” (Kinsey et al., 1986:133) Instead they advocate increasing the powers of police authorities and giving them the responsibility to encourage debate over crime and conducting local crime surveys. This could however be extend to even more local democratic bodies for certain areas or long lasting cases or series of crimes.
Prisons have been said to have been in an almost perpetual state of crisis recently (Cavadino & Dignan, 2003), the most important of which is crisis of resources. This has manifested itself recently with a record prison populations leading to massive overcrowding across the 139 prisons in England and Wales (Dalton, 2007a).
Overcrowding has led to a poor standard of accommodation, which Cavadino and Dignan (2002:189) suggest is ‘a byword for squalor’ with lack of access to adequate toilet facilities, lack of time outside cells and cell sharing. Similary a record 91 self-inflicted deaths in prison was recorded in 1999 (Cullen and Minchin, 2000) and Morgan (2002) notes that about a quarter of all prisons are Victorian buildings, most of these older prisons are local prisons which suffer the most overcrowding. As Dalton (2007b) notes at present the strategy is to release some prisoners early and attempt to build the way out of the problem, creating 9,500 extra places by 2014, but estimates suggest that cells will run out then too.
Fundamentally, a change in policy is necessary here. Cavadino & Dignan (2002) suggest that the judiciary is the ‘crux of the [penal] crisis’ and suggest a list of reforms including empowering bodies to create enforceable guidelines for sentencing to make it more consistent, in addition to other measures to encourage the judiciary to be more lenient. However, why leave the same people running the system if they have been too punitive, and why stick to sentences given out by them if they too are too punitive. As Dalton (2007b) argues, the judiciary should be elected and democratically elected tribunals should review existing sentences.
Overcrowded prisons also don’t help reduce crime either. As government figures show six out of every ten released from prison end up back inside within two years, this cannot be improved by a situation which has seen prisoners being locked up for longer in their cells, rather than tackling some prisoner’s underlying problems such as illiteracy or innumeracy. As Dalton (2007b) points out, a reduction in the prison population would free up resources which could be used towards the rehabilitation of those it is still deemed necessary to detain.
In conclusion, the perfect criminal justice system is both possible and impossible in that on reaching its stated aim it will have fulfilled its purpose and fall into disuse. In the opinion of the author of these words most other approaches tend to keep crime down to manageable levels rather than rid us of it. This solves no-ones problems; people still get victimised, offenders get stigmatised for life and the public foots the millions and billions necessary to make the system work.
This essay has thus taken a distinctly Marxist position, drawing in particular on Lenin’s notion of the withering away of the state. We have discussed what this position would put forward as the reasons for crime and how this influences how the criminal justice system should operate to help alleviate these problems. We have then discussed how to implement these ideas within several branches of the criminal justice system. From this we have shown that perfecting the criminal justice system to the point where it is no longer needed, will take a long time and will generally consist of increasing democratisation. Wider changes in society will also be needed to supplement these processes. Crime breeds inequality, so it seems only apt that achieving real equality is the solution to this problem.

References

Cavadino, M. & Dignan, J. (2002) The Penal System, 3rd ed. London: SAGE
Cullen, C. & Minchin, M. (2000) The Prison Population in 1999, Home Office Research Findings No. 118, London: Home Office
de Haan, W. (1991) ‘Abolitionism and Crime Control: A Contradiction in Terms’ In: Stenson, K. & Cowell, D. eds. (1991) The Politics of Crime Control, London: SAGE
Dalton, I. (2007a) ‘Reid’s prison disaster’, The Socialist, 1st-7th February pg.5
Dalton, I. (2007b) ‘Overcrowded prisons, overworked staff’, The Socialist, 13th-19th September pg.4
Engels, F. (1971) ‘Introduction to the Civil War in France’ In: Marx, K. & Engels, F. On the Paris Commune, Moscow: Progress Publishers
Feilzer, M. & Young, R. (2006) ‘Crime Scene Oxford’: The impact of a factual newspaper column on readers of a local newspaper – Final Report to the Nuffield Foundation, Oxford: Centre for Criminology
Johnstone, G. (2000) ‘Penal Policy Making: Elitist, Populist or Participatory?’, Punishment & Society, 2(2): pp.161-180
Kinsey, R., Lea, J. & Young, J. (1986) Losing the Fight Against Crime, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Lea, J. & Young, J. (1996) ‘Relative Deprivation’ In: Muncie, J., McLaughlin, E. & Langan, M. eds. Criminological Perspectives: A Readers, London: SAGE
Lenin, V. I. (1987) ‘The State and Revolution’, In: Christman, H. M. eds. Essential Works of Lenin: “What is to be done?” and Other Writings, Mineola: Dover
Marx, K. (1996) ‘Wage Labour and Capital’ In: Marx, K. Wage Labour and Capital & Wages, Price and Profit, London: Bookmarks
McLaughlin, E. & Muncie, J. eds. (2001) The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, London: SAGE
Morgan, R. (2002) ‘Imprisonment’ In: Maguire, M., Morgan, R. & Reiner, R.. Eds. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP
Scraton, P. (1985) The State of the Police, London: Pluto Press
Sell, H. (2006) Socialism in the 21st Century, 2nd ed. London: Socialist Publications
Taaffe, P., Grant, E. & Walsh, L. (1983) The State… A Warning to the Labour Movement, London: Militant
Taylor, I. (1981) Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism, London: Macmillan
Wacquant, L. (2007) ‘How to Escape the Law and Order Trap’, Criminal Justice Matters, 70 pp.39-40
Young, J. (1981) ‘Thinking seriously about crime: some models of criminology’ In: Fitzgerald, M., McLennan, G. & Pawson, J. eds. Crime & Society: Readings in History and Theory, London: Routledge
Young, J. (1991) ‘Left Realism and the Priorities of Crime Control’ In: Stenson, K. & Cowell, D. eds. (1991) The Politics of Crime Control, London: SAGE

Upcoming Posts

As you have seen i've posted on some of the things touched on in this post before (ie left realist criminology, media and crime, and crime and alienation) expect over the next few weeks/months/whenever i get around to it:-

A review of the State of the Police with some commentary on the 'left idealist' branch of critical criminology
A post on relative deprivation as a 'cause' of crime
A post on the criminal justice system and the paris commune
A post on The State and Revolution and the criminal justice system
A review of The State: A warning to the Labour Movement
A post on political economy and crime
A review(s) of Cavadino & Dignan's arguements about the penal system