Category: Identity Politics

decarceration, men and women

3/1/2021

742 words; 6-minute read

The UK government is planning on creating 500 more places for women in prison. In response, Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist, has written a powerful piece recommending the phasing out of women’s prisons altogether.

This is absolutely the right objective. The record regarding women and prisons is appalling: the number of women in UK prisons has doubled since 1993 (as if women are twice as bad as they were 27 years ago!); the use of community sentences has halved in a decade; 62% of women serve sentences of less than 6 months (up from 30% in 1993) causing massive disruption to their lives and those of their dependants. The government’s mindless response to this last point is to allow more children to sleep with their mothers in prison.

So yes, for a host of reasons women’s prisons should be done away with.

Interestingly, there is no suggestion in Sodha’s piece that men’s prisons should be done away with too. The reason why women’s prisons should be eliminated while men’s are retained is, she says, because ‘female offenders are very different from their male counterparts’.

How are they different?

First, says Sodha, men are ‘far more violent than women, and always have been’. This is absolutely true. ‘Prison sentences are most appropriate for dangerous and violent crime’, she continues. So because men commit the ‘vast majority’ of violent crime, men’s prisons must be retained.

But a 2019 report by the Prison Reform Trust shows that 69% of the 59,000 people sent to prison in 2018 had committed a non-violent offence. Some of these will have been women, but given that ‘only’ 5% of the people in prison in the UK are women, the vast majority of these non-violent offences will have been carried out by men.

So on Sodha’s criterion that prison should be reserved for violent criminals, two-thirds of men’s prisons should be closed down too.

A second reason she gives for why female offenders are different to their male counterparts is that ‘two-thirds of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse’, and that while ‘not every female criminal is a victim … coercive abusive relationships can serve to draw women into crime’. This is also absolutely true and it’s a chilling reminder that behind many crimes lie stories of damaged lives.

But if a history of damage and disadvantage is a reason for an offender’s decarceration then perhaps this applies to histories other than those of abusive relationships too?

For example, 62% of people entering prison have a reading age of 11 or lower (four times greater than the general population). Similarly, a third of people (34%) assessed in prison in 2017–18 reported that they had a learning disability or difficulty. Low literacy leads to non/underemployment and a potential turn to crime for survival. And these statistics are themselves a reflection of profound structural disadvantage.

Just as not every female criminal is a victim, as Sodha says, not everyone with a low reading age or learning disability ends up in prison. But in both cases the chances of eventual imprisonment are increased. So once again, if a history of harm leads us to conclude that women’s prisons should be shut down, should not the same criterion be applied to men’s?

While Sodha is right about the specifics of the differences between female and male offenders (the former’s non-violent crimes are different to those of the latter, as is the nature of the harm they suffer that predisposes them to imprisonment), they share the key features that Sodha says should lead to the phase out - or at least a reduction in the number - of prisons: non-violent crime and a history of harm.

I very much hope that women’s prisons are phased out, or at the very least that the government’s plans to increase the number of places for women are abandoned, never to return.

And once that happens I look forward to Sodha turning her fire on incarceration in general, for there is more in the arguments that unite the genders against imprisonment than keeps them apart.

identity politics and economic inequality

2/13/2021

348 words; 3-minute read

Yesterday I pointed out the coincidence between the rise in acceptance of the equality claims of discriminated identitarian groups and the increase in levels of economic inequality in OECD nations. I didn’t argue for either correlation or causation between these two phenomena. The possibilities range from them being completely unrelated to strict causality.

In a recent London Review of Books article William Davies asks ‘why, in an age when inequality has been rising, have work and wealth ceased to provide the grounds of political identity?’ By way of an answer he’s right to point out the structural obstacles: ‘The relationship between class and voting behaviour grows progressively weaker as society becomes economically, culturally and morally more individualistic’. But maybe there’s more to it than that.

Davies also refers to the classic Marxist distinction between a class ‘in itself’ which has objective interests as a class, and a class ‘for-itself’ where that class becomes self-conscious of these interests and acts to get them realised. The progress from ‘in-itself’ to ‘for-itself’ is rocky and unpredictable and it depends on a combination of (shared) lived experience and intellectual work (‘consciousness-raising’). So another way of putting Davies’ question is why is it proving increasingly difficult for the economically dispossessed to realise its ‘for-itself’ identity?

All politics is identity politics in the sense of collectives coming to be aware of shared interests rooted in a shared identity. But it seems to be easier to mobilise collectives grounded in ethnicity, gender, and religion than those with shared interests as a social class. Members of the former collectives seem to ‘know’ and recognise each other more readily than members of the latter.

Is it fair to say that it’s harder work to ground political identity in economic inequality than in ethnicity, gender and religion? More particularly does it require different work? If so, what is that work and have we forgotten how to do it?

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

2/12/2021

444 words; 4-minute read

‘One of the principal problems of democratic co-existence is the proliferation of so-called ‘hate speech’”. So begins a recent Serge Champeau and Daniel Innerarity article in El País (7 February 2021), reproduced here.

There’s certainly plenty of hate speech about and social media have made it a lot easier to dispense it. There’s also no doubt that hate speech does real damage to individuals and - this is Champeau’s and Innerarity’s point - it can have a corrosive effect on the ties that bind democracies together.

But there’s more to be said about hate speech and democracy. The clue is here: ‘This debate is less about classic ideological confrontation and more at the level of the personal’. The suggestion is that where we used to argue about issues that divide left and right, issues around poverty and economic equality, now we dish out and - and take - personal offence instead.

Lots of political capital has gone into combating hate speech because it’s not just personal: it’s directed at individuals by virtue of their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. Progress has been made, at least as far as law-making goes, in regard to protecting these identities and the people who wear them.

Whether all this has damped down the centrifugal forces threatening democratic cohesion or exacerbated them by shining the bright light of the law on what separates us, is a matter for conjecture. More to the point here is whether this attention to the personal has crowded out the political in the traditional, ideological, sense of the word.

Three observations on this:

1. At the same time as there’s been huge progress in recognising the equality claims of discriminated identities, income inequality has risen across all OECD countries
2. Right-wing parties (though not all of them) have found it easier to ‘modernise’ and accept LGBT equality claims (for example), than claims for economic equality. The UK Conservative Party is a good example.
3. I have no idea if there is a causal link between the increase in equality for discriminated groups in OECD countries and a decrease in economic equality in the same countries.

However (3) turns out, economic inequality is surely as much a threat to democratic co-existence as hate speech. In fact, if there was less of the former we might see less of the latter, a strategy that seems not to have occurred to the French government as it pursues its laicité agenda while leaving the Muslim banlieues to their economically marginalised fate.

whose identity?

6/24/2020

(717 words - 6 minute read)

In a recent article in the London Review of Books surveying feminist manifestos, Joanna Biggs says that it’s always been clear what women want: ‘girls just wanna be human, not other’.

Indeed, but what does being human mean?

It’s been pointed out ad nauseam that ‘human’ all too often means ‘man’, so the question ‘what do women want’ is frequently answered with, ‘what men have.’ This is a bad answer. It’s bad not only because it’s wrong to define a generic term (human) in terms of a particular (man), but also because a) ‘man’ is itself a generic term, and b) what men have isn’t always good anyway.

The same might be said of the movement against racism. What do BAME people want? It’s surely not enough to answer, ‘what non-BAME people already have’. Again ‘non-BAME’ covers a multitude of different conditions, and even if we could identify some representative non-BAME person, who’s to say that that person’s life is the model on which to base BAME demands?

Let’s take a specific example of what happens if we model identity-based demands on the experiences of the dominant identity.

In a review of the BAME experience of the criminal justice system Labour MP David Lammy found that ‘between 2006 and 2014, 41% of black defendants pleaded not guilty in crown courts compared with 31% of white defendants. Consequently, black defendants lose the opportunity of reduced sentences through early guilty pleas and distrust in the system is reinforced.’

This looks unfair. It looks as though equity demands that the same proportion of blacks as whites should be able to plead guilty so as to get a reduced sentence.

But what Lammy doesn’t point out is that solicitors will often advise defendants to plead guilty to crimes with which they’ve been charged but haven’t committed, so as to be sure of a reduced tariff.

In what sense, exactly, would giving more black defendants a longer sentence than they deserve be an improvement? But that’s where Lammy’s version of fairness takes us in the absence of non-identity based criteria for fairness.

It looks as though identity-based politics needs criteria drawn from outside any already-existing identity if the aspiration to ‘be human’ is to be fulfilled.

Where is this ‘outside? One possibility is that one identity can speak for all the others. If the most downtrodden identity can be emancipated won’t that entail the emancipation of everyone?

I’m not sure any identity can claim special privileges in this regard. Marx thought that the proletariat was the universal class, so once it was freed everyone would be freed. Maybe, but might not proletarian freedom always be proletarian freedom?

The black feminists of the 1974 Combahee River Collective similarly argued that black women are the carriers of a universalist freedom on the grounds that ‘If black women were free it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression’.

Perhaps. But first, there will always be someone lower down the pecking order who will argue that their particular form of oppression has been left out. Second, and linked, because as long as our understanding of freedom is tied to any identity’s interests it can’t and won’t be universal.

So if the ‘outside’, the universal, can’t be the property of any particular identity, where is it? Currently the best bet is ‘intersectionality’ where it’s recognised that different forms of oppression - race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, gender - intersect and overlap. But intersectionality has yet to show that a movement that multiplies difference can point us towards the universal.

And that is surely what we need, because the choice is clear: ‘Feminism can ask for the things men have,’ writes Biggs, ‘or it can ask for the world to be organised differently’.

Notes from a cliff-edge

decarceration, men and women

identity politics and economic inequality

Hate speech, democracy and economic equality

whose identity?

Andrew Dobson

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