Breaking Down the Poverty to Prison Pipeline
Shabnam Ali / May 1 / Civil Rights
Downing Street suggests that the UK should be an international ‘model’ for racial equality in their official report on the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) this year. Not only does this inadequately reflect the true experiences of ethnic communities in the melting pot that is the UK, this significantly downplays the efforts of race equality movements such as the global Black Lives Matter, whilst minimizing the evident institutional and structural barriers in place for marginalised communities.
By definition, institutional racism (IR) and systemic racism can be used synonymously and in an interchangeable manner. In an umbrella definition, systemic/structural racism refers to: “how ideas of white superiority are captured in everyday thinking at a systems-level: taking in the big picture of how society operates, rather than looking at one-on-one interactions.” In narrow terms, IR can be defined as: “the blocking of people of colour from access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society.”
This piece will explore this association of the reality of Britain’s institutional racism and its direct link to higher rates of poverty and subsequent prison rates for ethnic societies, demonstrating the multidimensionality of these issues evidenced in the poverty to prison pipeline.
The generational struggle of social mobility
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that:
The two main classifications of poverty are:
Relative poverty – a condition where household income is a certain percentage below-median incomes.
Echoing that of the United States, homes in black neighbourhoods are “generally and historically worth less than white homes because the developers and businesses that make a neighbourhood, well, a neighbourhood, are less likely to be there.” This has negative socio-economic trickle-down effects on the black community, such as a lower tax base, meaning less tax income to invest in schools, fewer nurseries, fewer qualified teachers and generally fewer progressive opportunities. These low-income communities are systematically designed by Governments to house minorities and provide little progression outside of the area, with the only liable options being through higher education and chances at salary work.
Yet what about the lack of consideration for minority children who either struggle with learning or do not have adequate home conditions to cultivate such academic growth? The prolonged effects of financial instability, single-parent families, or abusive/broken homes are not considered which can negatively impact a child’s future pathway. These unstable financial and social conditions are not acknowledged by the deciding Government who believe they have helped such communities simply by housing them. Often stacked up in high rise unsafe and unsanitary council buildings as a quick and easy fix, there are several domino consequences on the growth of these families and children.
The Tower Block way of living, generally in the large cities of the UK; London, Birmingham and Manchester, has detrimental social effects on the communities and its youth, including rising crime rates to escape this systemic poverty, which our Government are clearly aware of yet strive to make no change. The Government continues the cat and mouse game with Scotland Yard acting as the strong arm to over-police these poor and malleable members of our youth, letting them kill each other through gang violence rather than provide structural support, such as investing in the youth via youth clubs for example.
In the last decade especially, many young people have found success in the music industry as their escape from systemic poverty. This harrowing issue of closing youth clubs is highlighted closer to home by rap artist J-hus from East London, Stratford who writes: “they [the government] closed down the youth clubs and built a new prison” directly linking the effect of cuts on youth centres and criminal/prison rates in the BAME community as “third of London’s youth centres face closure.”
One key example of this poor housing can be seen with the example of the great fire of Grenfell 2017 in North Kensington, West London where an entire council block, housing a large BAME community, burnt down due to unchecked and cheaper cladding material.
Another example of this in 2021 was seen in South London, Croydon where a resident of an 11-storey building shared her home “inside mould-ridden tower block with 'worst living conditions' experts have ever seen” covered by damp, mould and numerous leaks. Only after mass social media uproar and coverage in the BAME communities, was the health of these residents considered, with Fransoy Hewitt who shared her home via social media, finally rehoused “despite contacting the council at least 20 times.” This pressing matter of poverty, housing and cuts on youth centres directly links to the over-imprisonment of BAME individuals, in the fight to escape poverty.
Black mould inside the building
Overrepresentation of the BAME community in Prison
In 2016, the Government commissioned an independent review to consider the treatment of, and outcomes for, BAME groups individuals within the criminal justice system in England and Wales, labelled the Lammy Review after MP David Lammy. A figure which shocked the public and still shapes the discussion today is that
The review also concluded that “there is greater disproportionality in the number of Black people in prisons in England and Wales than in the United States.” (Lammy, 2017, p.3) These figures are unsurprising to the BAME communities considering the level of over-policing we experience; receiving suspicious looks from the Met Police for driving expensive cars in established localities, stopped and searched more often and even extended to a local level, being followed around in shops by security. The Macpherson report 1999, prompted by the inquiry into the Metropolitan Police force’s handling of Stephen Lawrence’s murder concluded that “policing was institutionally racist and gave a set of 70 recommendations to address this” yet still we see little visible structural change in reality.
In regards to the discussion regarding young people, in BAME communities and the rise in Youth Crime which has been a touching subject particularly in the last decade, the Lammy Review reports that over the last ten years: “first offending rates increased among the BAME young population (from 11% in March 2016 to 19% in March 2016)” and this can be attributed to the systemic conditions of poverty many groups face as mentioned before; criminality as a means of escape or expression of a broken and unstable familial system. In finality on this topic, the Review concludes that “although arrests are disproportionate this does not fully explain the make-up of the youth custody population.” As a result, we must dig deeper into racial constructs to explain why there is such a huge population of BAME youth offenders and the review suggests that one reason for this is that “BAME defendants were more likely than White defendants to receive prison sentences for drug offences, even when factors such as past convictions are taken into account the higher rates of poverty experienced by black families, the higher rates of permanent exclusion from school and the higher rates of arrest among teenagers.” The only way to deconstruct this is from a racial lens; BAME defendants are punished heavily for their criminal attempt to escape government-induced and systemic poverty, with prison sentences which affect the rest of their future; entered into ‘the system’; a label which stays, whereas White defendants are given a slap on the wrist in comparison.
This explains the institutional racism, which shapes Police systems in the Western world, and Scotland Yard’s over-imprisonment of BAME individuals. For these ethnic youth and individuals, conditions of poverty which ultimately drove them to decisions of criminality to change conditions for their families, their finances, family and mental health are considered less. Another deconstruction of the race and poverty disparities in the prison population includes an unspoken inequality in the risk assessment tools used whereby “disadvantaged offenders [receive] harsher sentences than more advantaged offenders.” Critics have often been concerned that these tools reinforce the view that “economic disadvantage and poverty are the fault of individuals rather than structural and societal problems.” This is heavily problematic by blame-shifting to the communities who struggle in the face of such inequality and government-induced conditions of poverty.
The systemic poverty, over-policing, and over-imprisonment of the BAME Youth and communities are key and significant indicators that institutional racism does continue to exist in UK infrastructure. The disproportionate level of BAME population vs prison population can be tied to roots of systemic poverty induced and ignored by governments, creating a Hunger Games style competition within such low-income communities, sadly resorting to violence in a battle to compete, to ultimately escape the position our government placed them in. A simple acknowledgement by the Government of their part in this institutional racism would go a long way in healing the deep generational wound, for the UK’s BAME community, by officially recognising our systemic struggles as ethnic minorities.
The nature of the poverty to prison pipeline is cyclical and has caused years of generational trauma for the BAME community as a result of institutional racism in the British Government’s housing and Policing associations in particular. Sadly, as we saw in the 2021 CRED report, such admission cannot be expected.