‘Our outlook on criminal justice is pre-Victorian’

Best-known for his Orwell Prize-winning memoir Poverty Safari, Darren McGarvey is a stern critic of what he sees as the widespread systemic failures emerging from late capitalism.

In an interview with BASW England professional officer Wayne Reid, McGarvey explores the inadequacies of the current criminal justice system, calling for a more nuanced approach that considers the social and psychological factors influencing criminal behaviour.

Below is an edited version of the interview.

How much responsibility do you think the criminal justice system bears for perpetuating the cycle of poverty and crime, and particularly recidivism, repeat offending?

We talk a lot about rehabilitation in this country when we all know from working in prison systems and living in communities where the prison population is primarily drawn from, that there isn't any rehabilitation going on in any prison.

We don't even have drug rehabilitation or detox facilities, when we know for a fact that many of the people who end up there are there because of a drug problem that has produced criminality or some other form of crisis.

We know, because there's a vast evidence base about what works in Norway, for example, where recidivism rates are far lower, and they have a strong emphasis on rehabilitation. 

People who work in prisons in Norway are trained as much in the psychological dynamic of why a person may end up there, as well as being trained in the usual ‘this is how you restrain a person’, whereas here there's just lip service paid to that stuff. 

We're really just relying on the personal compassion of individual prison officers or governors to set a tone and culture. And no matter how well meaning and energetic or enthusiastic they are, eventually they will be ground down by the prevailing culture.

Until we retool our justice system and put rehabilitation at the core of our strategy, you're going to see recidivism continue. You're going to see almost a kind of resignation on the part of many of the prison population that they will spend the rest of their lives cycling in and out of the criminal justice system. 

In the UK, unfortunately, the politics are so fraught and extreme that we are choosing to do the inefficient, more expensive thing, because the politics demands that we stay in that cycle of decline.

Social workers and criminal justice professionals are sometimes seen as opposed in terms of ideology. Do you think there's scope for harmonious and meaningful multiagency working to ensure the balance of rehabilitation and punishment or are we just being idealistic about that?

Social work is in one silo, criminal justice, seemingly in another – there's not always great connectivity between the two. On the surface, it can seem like these are antagonistic ideologically, but as most people understand, it's usually a blend of both applied appropriately in specific contexts that elicits the greatest responses. 

That's certainly what I found to be effective when I was working frontline in the community, when I was dealing with troubled young people. 

There's also a fundamental question to be asked about the level of culpability of someone who committed a crime under the duress of an addictive mind, who also suffers from trauma, for whom a better way of behaviour has yet to be modelled.

There have to be consequences, but is that person even neurologically capable of perceiving their behaviour in the way that the criminal justice system believes they should? There’s a lack of emotional, psychological sophistication that underscores a lot of our approaches, which I think speaks more to a kind of medieval approach to justice.

If you get to the root of a lot of Britain's public services and a lot of the principles that underscore British life, you see that we're still very firmly embedded in a kind of pre-Victorian outlook on criminal justice. 

We may have the high-tech equipment, but right at the core, we're still very much wedded to this idea that you can just punish people to change, and not everyone responds to punishment in that way.

Living conditions aren't always sufficient and suitable for both young offenders and adult prisoners. Is there a degree of people losing their humanity once they become part of that secure estate?

 

Yes. In Scotland, we have numerous cases over the last few years in young offenders institutions of suicides - sometimes young people who haven't committed the most serious crimes, either. They've had a period of difficulty in their life, this has resulted in criminal justice involvement, and when ingested into the criminal justice system, the process has just been so overpowering that they felt that the only way out of it was to end their own lives. That's a real indictment of every layer of this society, to be honest.

Would you say that the criminal justice system is inherently biased against people in poverty? Or is that just too reductive and simplistic? 

It’s true that poorer communities are over-policed. Some people argue there is more crime, but if a community is over-policed there are also more means to detect crime. If you policed other communities that weren’t poor, and you changed the law to look at some of their moral behaviour, you might see in more upper-class cultures all of the behaviour at that level of society that we deem immoral, that's legal. It's no coincidence that these people write the law. But that's what happens in a hierarchical, topsy turvy society.

So, it's absolutely true, poorer people are over-policed, ethnic minorities are overrepresented. That's a direct result of the over-policing of those particular demographics, as well as the level of poverty and community stress that those predominantly young men are exposed to. 

That's not making an excuse for behaviour or running drugs or stabbing people or being involved in gun violence. Consequences must be paid, and I spend much time with victims of those crimes, but it's absolutely true that people from those backgrounds are discriminated against by dint of the economic structure of the country, and then by the legislation that's haphazardly thrown together to try and present the illusion that crime is being dealt with.

Social workers and criminal justice professionals working in deprived communities are overstretched and under resourced. Do you really think they can make a difference when it comes to reforming policy, practice and education?

On one hand, they're in a constant crisis management posture, where they're trying to meet ever more complex needs presenting in the community. And then, on the other hand, they've got to get their political campaign hats on and learn how to translate what they see in their day-to-day work into the kind of language that a politician will find interesting.

That's a big challenge for not just public services, but for third sector organisations who, from a distance, can sometimes seem too absorbed in the political campaigning side, when actually third sector and public services have very little choice but to perform that unsustainable dual role. 

It's a sign of the times, which means that even politicians begin to feel overwhelmed by the competing needs they survey from their vantage point. 

You would think that the new government would look not only at criminal justice, but at some of the determinants that shape a person's trajectory.

This means going right back to early years, placing more support for families that are vulnerable – single parent families, families that already have a parent in prison. These all increase the risk (of) police involvement, which increases the risk of criminal justice. And so, the cycle begins. 

There's a reason why the prisons are full of mentally ill, physically unwell, poor people, and it's not just because they have an innate tendency towards criminality. It's because of the economic structure and how that manifests at the social level. 

There should be a grand plan that unites a country, that says, once and for all, we are going to address not just the problems, but the root causes of the problems.

Britain is in a really bad place right now, so we do need visionary leadership. Unfortunately, this state of permanent crisis really does constrain anybody's sense of possibility. 

How do you think early intervention services can be reframed to policymakers and decisionmakers so it's seen as essential, rather than just a luxury or a kind of ‘lefty, liberal’ approach? 

Ideally you would want to get to a place where there was less need for those interventions, because those interventions are, by their very nature, reactive. 

If you took long term action on the drivers of the inequalities, then you would start to see a decline in that level of need. 

We need to stem the bleed where lives are lost, whether it's literally or figuratively, to all of the attended miseries associated with the sort of poverty that produces the vast majority of people in the criminal justice system.

There is far more evidence and support for reforming criminal justice than there is for keeping it the same. 

The political intransigence in the UK is a real stumbling block.

 

We know from the empirical data that criminal justice is overwhelmed with people with serious mental health issues and drug addictions. If you had a magic wand, what interventions or measures would you conjure up to begin to address these perennial and deeply rooted issues?

The first would be to reform the education system, and then reform of the labour market as these things are closely linked.

Education prepares us for work, and the quality of an education will reflect the quality of the work – these are the main drivers of social mobility. 

Our education system is 100 years old and needs reform. And as for the labour market, one of the big impediments to working class communities getting a foothold in the social mobility game is the fact that workers have been hampered from collectively bargaining for better pay and conditions. 

I would also look at reforming welfare, not just in terms of the current model of welfare, which is based on the same sort of moral outlook as a corrupt American health insurance company, where the job is to just decline any request for help, until you are legally obligated to supply it. That's what the welfare system has become. 

I would look at integrating health with welfare. So if we were going to sanction someone for not turning up for an interview, and it was clear that one of the impediments is a long term mental health issue, or an addiction, we don't cut their money and leave them to go to food banks and push them further into poverty, which just costs us more. 

What we do is we say, ‘Your sanction is that you've got to go and attend sessions with a mental health professional, or an addiction worker, and then we'll be here to support you.’

It’s about getting more sophisticated about what social insurance looks like, that takes into consideration what the barriers are for some people to getting into work, rather than this overly judgmental culture.

What advice would you give to social workers or criminal justice professionals working within deprived or marginalised communities or with offenders in the criminal justice system?

My call to action would always be about how they take care of themselves so they can bring their best to the job they do every day.

It's a dispiriting and demoralising experience to be working frontline in any area, whether you're a nurse, a doctor, a paramedic, a police officer or a social worker. 

The reason I place emphasis on self-care is not this idea that we just change the world by changing our perspective. It's about having the physical, mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual fitness to be able to consistently show up for people who are going to drain you of your energy, to consistently turn up within a workplace that is going to drain you of your enthusiasm, to be able to go away and refuel so that when you come back then you're not just phoning it in. 

It's essential that people take time to reconnect with why they're doing what they're doing, to overcome the weariness, the cynicism and the scepticism that this system almost produces in us as a byproduct. It’s about how we get ourselves into a good space where we're not feeling defeated by everything.