Although the evidence suggests that you cannot be ‘tough on crime’ without being ‘tough on inequality’, a shift from the welfare state to the security state has taken place over the last half century. In the UK and US, ‘tough on crime, tough on welfare’ rhetoric has long been embraced by the major parties. The result has been rapidly rising prison populations and widening social inequality. In the UK, each place in prison costs £75,000 to build and a further £37,000 a year to run (an expense greater than the annual cost of studying at Eton, the elite British school).63 The annual cost of incarceration in the US is about $63 billion.64 Criminal justice expenditure in some US states outstrips funding for public education. Over the past couple of decades, California has built roughly one new prison a year, at a cost of $100 million each.65 Over the same period, it has built only one new public college. Across the US, spending on prisons has risen six times faster than on higher education.66 Observing the immense costs of an expanding criminal justice system, philosopher Douglas Husak asks: ‘Is there no better use for the enormous resources we expend on criminalization and punishment? Money and manpower are diverted from more urgent needs [to] enforce laws that our best theory of criminalization would not justify.’67
The vast resources we expend on locking people up could be used to reduce inequality, thereby improving people’s lives and eliminating many of the conditions that breed crime. Yet, for decades, politicians have rejected this framing of the problem. President Ronald Reagan asserted: ‘we are told that the answer to . . . [crime] is to reduce our poverty. This isn’t the answer . . . Government’s function is to protect society from the criminal, not the other way around.’68 Former British Prime Minister John Major warned in 1993 that ‘Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less’.69
The data show that higher rates of material inequality, within and between nations, strongly correlate with larger prison populations. The more unequal a society is, the higher the percentage of people in jail.70 And people lower down the social hierarchy, with less income and less education, are far more likely to end up in prison.71 The most unequal societies – led by the US and Singapore with the UK and Israel not too far behind – have, by a wide margin, the largest proportion of their populations behind bars. The most equal countries – Japan, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark – imprison a much lower proportion of their populations. The differences are not small. In the US there are 576 people in prison per 100,000, fourteen times higher than Japan, which has a rate of forty prisoners per 100,000.72 When US states are compared, the pattern holds, with more unequal states tending to have larger prison populations.
The differences in crime rates can only account for a small part of the variation in the numbers imprisoned across the range of countries. It tends to be ideology that determines how often imprisonment is favoured over non-custodial sentences and how harsh sentencing will be. The UK regularly leads the rest of Western Europe in rates of imprisonment. Since 1990, the number of prisoners in the UK has doubled. But when we compare the UK with a country like the Netherlands, which has a much lower rate of imprisonment, roughly two-thirds of the difference can be traced to the fact that the Dutch favour lighter non-custodial sentencing and shorter sentences.73 In fact, in 2015, the Dutch government announced it was to close eight prisons due to a lack of prisoners.74
The dramatic increase in rates of imprisonment in the UK can be traced to Michael Howard’s assertion in 1992, as Conservative Home Secretary, that ‘prison works’. When he made this claim, 45 per cent of adults convicted in the Crown courts were put behind bars; in 2001, the figure had risen to 64 per cent.75 In what amounted to a continuation of Conservative policy, New Labour’s Home Secretary Jack Straw stated that ‘Prison doesn’t work but we’ll make it work’. In 2003, in a special edition of the flagship news programme Newsnight, Prime Minister Tony Blair proudly explained that his government had presided over a period in which more people had been sent to prison than ever before.76 Perhaps this was due, in part, to the fact that between 1997 and 2009 some 4,289 new criminal offences were created, approximately one for every day New Labour were in power.77
In the US, the situation is even more extreme. In 1978, roughly 450,000 people were imprisoned; by 2005, the figure had risen to over 2 million.78 As with the UK, this phenomenal rise was largely down to people being sent to prison rather than being given non-custodial sentences. Today, a quarter of the world’s convicts reside in America. In 2004, 360 of these were serving life sentences in California for the heinous crime of shoplifting.79 The irony of this was not lost on novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, who made the memorable observation that ‘the world’s “freest” country has the highest number’ in prison.80
Focusing on rehabilitation and root causes makes sense once we stop thinking of crime as a product of an individual’s free agency and view it, instead, as a doctor might view the symptoms of a disease. Although potentially dangerous, violent prisoners are not ultimately responsible for the threat they pose – anyone exposed to the conditions that breed violent crime could exhibit similar ‘symptoms’. Removing those ‘infected’ from society, as we would a person with a deadly virus, may be necessary – at least temporarily – but punishing them does nothing to prevent further ‘outbreaks’. Instead, it draws resources and attention away from discovering the deeper causes of the outbreak. A more humane and rational approach to crime would focus on eradicating the conditions that produced it, and instead cultivate the empathy, self-control and self-worth that is so bound up with ethical behaviour. To pretend, as legal systems do, that the buck stops with the individual prevents us from tackling the cultural, economic and political causes of violence and criminality.
Double standards
Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign warned of ‘the deterioration of respect for the rule of law’ and the danger of ‘the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them’, a principle he blamed on civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.81 Within a few years Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, facing impeachment over the Watergate scandal. Discussing the events in a 1977 interview with David Frost, he justified his actions with the words: ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’
Shortly after his resignation, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a presidential pardon. ‘I deeply believe in equal justice for all Americans whatever their station or former station,’ he insisted, adding that ‘a former President of the United States, instead of enjoying equal treatment with any other citizen accused of violating the law, would be cruelly and excessively penalized . . . And the credibility of our free institutions of government would . . . be challenged at home and abroad.’82 Justifying Ford’s actions, Dick Cheney,