Criminal Obsessions: Executive summary
Criminal Obsessions, the new report from the Crime and Society Foundation, is an innovative, groundbreaking critique of conventional thinking that sees the criminal justice system as being on the frontline for preventing and tackling crime.
The full report can be downloaded here (Adobe PDF, 1.3MB).
Chapter one: Beyond Criminology? By Professors Paddy Hillyard and Steve Tombs
The opening chapter subjects the claims made about the impact of criminal justice on crime to critical scrutiny. The authors point out that most crimes dealt with by the criminal justice system are minor or petty events that cause little physical or financial harm and often involve no victim at all. By comparison, much more serious crimes and harms - such as corporate crime, domestic violence and sexual assault - are rarely tackled by the criminal justice system. 'On almost any publicly state rationale upon which legitimacy has been sought for them,' the authors argue, 'criminal justice systems are ineffective'. But by targeting particular individuals and criminal acts for special treatment, and excluding other individuals and institutions, and the crime and harms they cause, criminal justice serves to maintain existing power relations.
The authors then explain how a 'social harm' perspective differs from a 'crime' one. A harm perspective means considering 'physical', 'financial/economic', 'emotional and psychological' and 'sexual' harms, among other things. Some of these harms are already encompassed by standard definitions of crime. Others, such as exposure to environmental pollutants or the trauma to victims caused by the failure of criminal justice to deal adequately with sexual assaults, tend to be ignored by the crime perspective. The authors conclude by pointing to the various advantages of a harm perspective. These include an enhanced ability to consider the underlying, rather than superficial, causes of various harms, and to develop more appropriate policy responses than are allowed for under a crime perspective.
Chapter two: Prime Suspect: Murder in Britain. By Professor Danny Dorling
Between January 1981 and December 2000 approximately 13,140 people were murdered in Britain. This chapter examines who was murdered, when, where and how they were murdered, and why they were murdered. Through such an analysis the underlying causes of murder, rather than their superficial ones, become clearer.
Over the twenty years covered by this analysis just under two murders were committed per day. Men were more likely to be murdered than women, and young men most likely to be murdered of all. Significantly, the rate of murder has increased in recent years. Over half of all murders in the last 35 years were committed in the last 15 years.
This increased rate of murder has not been distributed evenly across the population. Since 1981 the risk of being murdered has increased for men, but has decreased for women. But the strongest determinant of an individual's likelihood of being murdered is poverty. The risk of being murdered has decreased for the rich, but increased for the poor. 'The rise in murder in Britain has been concentrated almost exclusively in men of working age living in the poorest parts of the country', Dorling argues. The most common way of being murdered in poor areas was through being cut with a knife or broken glass, dispelling a common myth that gun crime is behind high murder rates in poor areas. Indeed a higher proportion of rich people are killed by guns than poor people.
In conclusion Dorling argues that the deeper causes of the increased murder rate lie in the social and economic policies pursued by successive governments during the 1980s and 1990s. The emergence of mass unemployment in the 1980s and the increased levels of poverty that continue to this day have contributed to social stresses and conflict with long-term consequences. There is no 'natural level of murder' Dorling suggests. 'For murder rates to rise in particular places... life in general has to be made more difficult to live, people have to be made to feel more worthless'.
Chapter three: Workplace Harm and the Illusions of Law. By Professor Steve Tombs
Hundreds of thousands of workers are killed and injured each year in the workplace. In this chapter Steve Tombs outlines what we do and do not know about work-related deaths and injuries, and suggests how they can be reduced.
A key problem with official statistics is the level of underreporting. Official figures on occupational fatalities understate the scale of the problem. Moreover workplace fatalities are only the most visible form of work-related physical harm. Non-fatal physical harms are massively underreported, while non-physical harms - such as financial- or ill-health-related ones - go largely unrecognised.
The costs of injury and ill-health has been estimated at some £18 billion per year, most of which is paid for by the government and the victims, not by business. This, Tombs argues, means that the 'costs associated with injuries and ill-health represent a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. That is, through the cost of industrial injury benefit, health and other social services, paying higher insurance premiums, paying higher prices for goods and services so that employers can recoup the costs of downtime, retraining, the replacement of plants and so on, private industry is subsidised on a massive scale by employees, taxpayers and the general public.'
Tombs goes on to examine official responses to a variety of workplace harms. The prevailing philosophy of business self-regulation means that employers' interests tend to dominate in the workplace over those of employees. Through the first audit ever undertaken of Health and Safety Executive data, Tombs points out that the number of workplace health and safety inspections has declined in recent years. In 2000/01 29% of amputations, 44% of asphyxiations, 67% of burns and 40% of injuries resulting from 'contact with electricity', 'contact with moving machinery' and 'high falls' were not investigated. This leads Tombs to argue that the 'law's promise with respect to protecting workers and members of the public from work-related death, injury and disease is more or less an illusion'.
In conclusion Tombs argues that the most effective means of making workplaces safer is for unions to play a far greater role and for union-appointed safety representatives to be the rule. 'Securing safer and healthier working environments is based upon redressing balances of power within and around workplaces', he argues. 'Within workplaces, this means wresting power away from employers and their claims regarding their rights to manage in an unhindered fashion. Beyond workplaces, this means challenging those ideologues who portray the protection of workers and the public as matters of nanny-state "red tape".'
Chapter Four: 'Social Harm' and its limits? By Professor Paddy Hillyard, Christina Pantazis, Professor Steve Tombs and Professor Dave Gordon
In conclusion the four authors examine some of the possible objections to a social harm perspective. 'Social harm' might appear too general and amorphous compared with 'crime' they acknowledge. There are also definitional and measurement problems with a social harm perspective. It might also be prone to political faddishness or relativistic understandings. But none of these, the authors argue, are fatal to a social harm perspective. By offering more coherent and holistic perspectives on the range of harms that afflict individuals and society as a whole, the social harm perspective can enable policy makers to escape the ideological straightjacket of a criminal justice perspective.