Crimes and Time

It is often claimed "don't do the crime if you cant do the time".  Such a statement, as well as being morally dubious, presumes that the criminal justice system rationally allocates prison time on the basis of just deserts. In fact sentencing is both more random than that and far more bias.  More often than not it is the person rather than the crime that attracts the sentence.  This can be personal but is often a response to the lawbreakers age, class and race.

Everyday through google alerts I get a couple of hundred news stories delivered to my inbox and today I got the following two stories one after the other in an e-mail.

St. Peters secretary gets prison for stealing $573K

Teen sentenced to prison under new spitting law

The theft of $573K was deemed to require six months in prison whilst the young woman who spat at a policeman got a year in prison and two years post prison supervision. Both pleaded guilty - to do anything else is to risk far more severe penalties- so we only hear the states case.  But the idea that courts (or lawmakers) can in any meaningful way weigh up crimes and allocate, as if by science, an appropriate amount of prison time which justly correlates to the specific crime is clearly total nonsense.  So both sentencing law and practice develops its own logic and the white collar criminal who carries out a fraud in a calculating way is deemed to need six months whilst the young woman, who lip is cut in a struggle with a police officer and then spits gets a year. 

Of course the whole idea of using prison as the standard response to almost all lawbreaking is silly and pointless but the way when it is used it is used disproportionally on the young, social excluded and powerless displays the inherent injustice of the criminal justice system.

Whose Cuts? What Harms?

The need for massive cuts in public spending is the new common sense. We are told by Liberals and Tories that There is No Alternative.  But the reality is we have many possibilities. The road being followed by the coalition is only one option and it is an option that will do a great deal of damage to social equality, the poorest and weakest in our society. The rich and powerful are likely to do very well thank you.

The reality is we already live in a very unequal society. No where is this more apparent than in death rates. Last week the National Audit Office revealed that the poor are still dying 10 years earlier than the rich.  At a time when it is proposed to defer the age for State retirement benefits until 70 this is highly relevant.  Poor people will be disproportionally effected by this (rich people can chose when to retire) and although man living in Kensington & Chelsea can look forward to over 14 years life after their 70th Birthday in Blackpool men die on average until there are 73.6.  This means reducing their retirement from 8.6 years to only 3.6 years.

In fact the reality may be considerably worse.  Although the Tory led coalition are protecting NHS spending our health is determined by a far greater range of factors.  The NHS treats us when we are ill rather than stopping us getting unwell. An article in the British Medical Journal reported by BBC News has found

Generally the trends showed that when social spending - including support for families and the unemployed - was high, death rates fell, but when they were low, rates rose substantially. In fact, for every £70 drop in spending per person there was a 1.19% rise in overall deaths.

So it likely that the massive cuts in welfare spending currently being proposed will reduce average life expectancy and that this average reduction will disproportionally impact on the poorer.  Therefore places like Blackpool will see there average life expectancy reduce from the current 73.6 and move downwards towards the new retirement age of 70.

Fortunately the policies of the Tories and Liberals are not inevitable and the extent to which they will be implemented will be impacted on by the level of resistance they experience.  So get active, get campaigning and remember Arundhati Roy's brilliant quote:

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

The cost of poverty

New research this month shows that people living in the poorest areas of England can expect to suffer about 17 more years of ill health and disability than those in wealthier areas. The research was commissioned by the Government and carried out by Michael Marmot. He correctly points out that tackling health inequalities is a matter of social justice.

I blogged last month about the damage done by poverty and inequality and gave a plug to Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's excellent book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.  This YouTube video plugs the book.  Watch and read the book.





Hat tip Janet Shapiro (via radstats)