The Poverty to Prison Pipeline

Threatening to rain terror down on criminals has long been a staple of the Tory offering, but behind it all is class war by other, more populist means. In this guest post Ruth Woolsey sets out the case.

Boris Johnson’s mega-prison will be ready just in time for the children Marcus Rashford has spent the last year campaigning for. It is well known that the majority of young people in prison come from impoverished backgrounds. Some have been abused and neglected by their own parents, but most families care about their loved one in prison and know their children would unlikely be in prison even if they were better off as they grew up. Faulty genes don't cause a life time scarred by crime and prison: structural inequalities do.

The children of the Tory cabinet will never know what poverty is like and will be told how they deserve their privileged positions just as their parents were. Yet, we can see that these children do not come away unscathed. The mental health problems associated with being shipped off to boarding school at a young age are expressed nicely by Tony Gammidge in Norton, Grim and I. Gammidge questions whether it is sensible having people subjected to such trauma should be running the country. As sympathetic as I am to the plight of these children, they will never go hungry and can afford therapy and have the chance to change the course of their lives. As for the lives of their poorer counterparts living on the periphery, they are unlikely to meet except perhaps in court as they hand down sentences to them.

The crimes of the poor, according to Reiman and Leighton in their 1979 classic The rich get richer and the poor get prison, are only a fraction of the harms caused by this ruling elite. When we take away how a crime was committed and look at the impacts of corporate negligence for example, even though someone may not have left their seat in their plush office in the city, thousands of people can be maimed and killed. And the people responsible are unlikely to end up in prison. A fine at worst, protected by an entourage of lawyers, accountants, politicians who pass bills which allow state and corporate violence. The poorer ‘criminals’ are an excellent distraction and are handy scapegoats for hiding the crimes of the wealthy.

How do they get away with it? For decades, thousands of writers have used Gramsci's ideas about how the state and key startegic institutions manufacture consent to the point it becomes unconscious and barely thought about. Economic individualism and neoliberal subjectivation has been pushed from the top since Thatcher assumed office 40 years ago. The public have had it drilled into them that it is up to individuals to look after themselves and their families and it is not state responsibility. Enough of the public accepted austerity being the only option to avoid further economic disaster, and so the Coalition government's tiresome benefits scroungers rhetoric went largely unchallenged. And the rich got richer.

So, the likes of Jacob Rees-Moggs must take sole responsibility for himself and his children (although nanny will obviously do that), which is easy when you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Not as easy for someone born into poverty and already has at least one parent working, whicih is the case for 72% of children. The difficulties of trying to work yourself out of poverty has been written extensively about, including by some who have experienced it. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is some of the biggest load of bollocks anyone can ever say, especially by rich people idling off the back of unearned income.

Parents who work long hours to make ends meet do not have enough time for their children as well as suffering physical and mental health problems associated with poverty themselves. Although every family and child is different, Joshua Dickerson’s poem Cause I ain't got a pencil paints a picture of the challenges a child in poverty has to deal with before reaching the school gates in the morning, let alone then navigating a middle class education system on arrival. Children in poverty have to do without the possessions and advantages enjoyed by their wealthier peers, or even if a school has large numbers of children in poverty they can see those who are living a very comfortable lifestyle compared to them, all of which can lead to feelings of resentment and inferiority. No wonder that children growing up in poverty are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

Children who are told if they work hard enough, they will get themselves out of poverty know this is absolute rubbish for most of them. One lad in prison for dealing drugs tod me how hard he saw his brother work to get through school and eventually graduate with a degree to end up working in McDonald's. Drug dealing is a viable option for many children finding their way out of poverty and who then get caught up in the county lines, of which the media are currently panicking about. It’s a depressingly familiar tale often leading to entry into the criminal justice system for violence. Hackney youth worker Luke Billingham and Keir Irwin-Rogers wrote in their chapter, 'Mattering and the violence in our cities' in the Urban Crisis, Urban Hopes collection that youth violence "is not about individual pathology and violent individuals, rather it is fostered by the societal structures which systematically deny marginalised people recognition, respect and resource" (2020 p.58).

Whether poor children have a parent who cares about them or the state is the parent for those in care, these are already the next generation of "criminals" because they will be criminalised for being vulnerable and poor. Their trauma, stress, and marginalisation will not be cured in prison but is exacerbated, and is clearly visible via high rates of recidivism. The cost per person in prison is significantly higher than what is spent on a child in poverty, but this befits neoliberal commonsense. It is not down to the state to provide for children, and therefore we must build more prisons instead.

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