The 'Is it a Crime to be Poor? ' alliance are working to challenge the ongoing criminalisation of poverty and vulnerable people. It’s a complex problem, so interdisciplinary thinking is key.
Non-payment of TV license is the most common offence for which women are convicted in England and Wales. In 2019, it accounted for 30 per cent of all convictions against women and a third of women who had to navigate the criminal justice system.
The ‘Is it a Crime to be Poor?’ alliance, involving a cross disciplinary team of researchers at the University of Birmingham (ICP Alliance) point to this as one of the clearest examples of the direct criminalisation of poverty in the UK – but it is far from an outlier.
Non-payment of council tax is a civil debt and not a crime, but magistrates have the power to commit someone to prison for up to three months. Hundreds of people are sentenced each year for begging or sleeping rough under anti-social behaviour laws. Many others are sent to prison for poverty-driven behaviour such as stealing food, sanitary products or baby products, with relatively harsher sanctions than those imposed for so called ‘white collar’ crimes such as tax evasion.
The ongoing cost of living crisis and the long shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic have pushed more people into poverty and forced some into having to make difficult choices that, in the eyes of the law, include criminal activities like those above.
Professor Sid Bandyopadhyay explains, “People who perhaps didn’t appreciate it before are now very aware that you can have money problems that aren’t of your own making. I think it’s untenable for our criminal justice system to keep functioning in the way it does – further criminalising those in financial difficulty and putting added strain on our justice system.”
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Poverty, though, is not only a financial measure. Although the lack of economic means is an important factor, poverty covers broader measures of what we might loosely call ‘human capital’. These include an individual’s social networks, access to education, and good health that, when absent, can make a person particularly vulnerable. These marginalised and minoritised people are more often exposed to the criminal justice system and more greatly harmed by it.
“It is why we don’t only see ourselves as asking if it is a crime to be poor,” continues Professor Bandyopadhyay. “Rather, we ask if it is a crime to be vulnerable. The alliance exists to help understand the mechanisms through which the vulnerable are criminalised and look at practical policies that can make a real difference.”
The ICP Alliance is a coalition of academics and charities made up of representatives from APPEAL, University of Birmingham, Coventry University, Liberty, Prisoners’ Advice Service, Durham University, Carolan57 Ltd, Canterbury Christ Church University, Revolving Doors, and University College London.
Disproportionately policing the vulnerable
Poorer socio-economic groups are over-represented in the criminal justice system. This situation becomes even more obvious when poverty is combined with other factors, such as coming from a minority ethnic background or suffering from mental ill health.
“We tend to talk about crime as if it is some unitary category and as though our response to it is entirely rational,” adds Dr Marianne Wade, Reader in Criminal Justice at Birmingham Law School. “In reality, our criminal justice system is the result of a near-unbroken 800-year history of laws and agencies that have built up and, predictably, carried over some of the discriminatory social attitudes of their founders.”
Even if the letter of the law does not discriminate (which it often does), how said laws are applied and the means by which people navigate the criminal justice system is inherently unequal. Those who are not equipped to deal with the challenges or complexities of the legal system will fare worse. Dr Wade says, “the criminalisation of poverty is rooted in our criminal justice processes as much as it is in the substantive law.”
Dr Marianne Wade
Reader in Criminal Justice
“This is why interdisciplinary research is so important. The legal rhetoric is very persuasive, and it is important to have it to go to, but without other disciplines the law is blind. It can’t see what’s really going on.”
That aligns with another core consideration for the alliance – the social construction of crime and how we define a ‘criminal’.
A review of the Crime Survey of England and Wales shows that most crimes do not receive a criminal justice response. “So,” asks Dr Wade, “how do we determine who is being held accountable for crimes? Often it is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ – those who aren’t able to afford high-priced lawyers or support – who are thrust into the criminal justice system. This is only worsened by the ongoing gamification of policing and criminal justice that comes with an obsession with targets, rather than a rational, proportional response to the crime itself.”
Focusing on those ‘easier convictions’ in order to boost conviction numbers is in part fuelled by a continued political rhetoric that pushes for practitioners to be ‘tough on crime’.
Professor Bandyopadhyay warns that this is not what the public really want. “I think the public understand these problems pretty well. Politicians like to talk about being tough on crime but that’s based on something of a misconception. If you ask the right questions of the public then you’ll find that they’re in favour of taking vulnerable people out of the criminal justice system and providing them with the support that they need. They support treatment programmes for addiction, support in finding affordable housing, or mentoring schemes to prevent reoffending. Truthfully, they want you to be tough on the causes of crime rather than punitive measures for lesser crime.”
Diverting people away from the criminal justice system through mentoring or additional support is a pragmatic, cost-effective solution that benefits individuals and society as a whole. Read more about the randomised control trial of Remedi restorative mentors, funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing website.
Setting the interdisciplinary agenda
The alliance is undertaking a suite of interdisciplinary activity including:
- A campaign to raise awareness of the over-policing of impoverished communities, and the criminalisation of poverty that takes place within the criminal justice system (and other systems and structures)
- Work to change the way people in poverty are presented and portrayed by the media and within political debates, including challenging the conflation of poverty and criminality
- Research on areas where the criminalisation of poverty is evident to tailor evidence-based solutions, and focus attention on structural inequalities that generate conditions of poverty that can foster criminal activity
One of the focus areas is on the so-called ‘school to prison pipeline’.
School exclusion is correlated with contact with the criminal justice system, and therefore a narrowing of opportunities in adult life, and in some cases incarceration. It’s a well-travelled road to exploitation by criminal gangs, for example. In 2019, the National Crime Agency found that 100% of children involved in County Lines had been excluded from school.
A lack of resources for children and young people experiencing difficulties at school leads to higher levels of children and young people being excluded from school, therefore feeding a pipeline that widens inequality. In 2017, the Institute of Public Policy estimated that out of the 85, 975 people in UK prisons, 54,164 were excluded when at school.
“This is something that our colleagues in education have been thinking about for a long time,” says Professor Bandyopadhyay. “At the moment the school-to-prison pipeline hypotheses is based on evidence from those in prison looking back on their experiences in education. What we really need to do is develop that evidence base, drawing on first-hand experience from experts in education and bringing in insight from other areas – law, economics, sociology, and more. It’s a particularly knotty issue that requires that breadth and depth of expertise.”
Building those holistically-minded hubs of knowledge from interdisciplinary research communities and practitioners is fundamental to the objectives of the alliance.
It builds on interdisciplinary successes achieved by the University’s Institute for Global Innovation (IGI) theme ‘21st Century Transnational Crime’.
“These complex problems require this kind of systems thinking that is not confined to any particular discipline,” says Professor Bandyopadhyay. “It takes time to reach out to different partners and then to develop something of a common language between all parties. It’s not just about finding ways of working together, but doing so in a way that doesn’t dilute the work itself. What the university has done through its support for interdisciplinary research is facilitate the formation of vital networks and provide the nurturing, supportive environment that understands the challenges we face. Those resources allow interdisciplinary work to flourish.”
While the exacts causes and potential solutions may differ in other countries, the problem exists across the globe. The alliance has a primary focus on reform in the UK, where they are looking to grow an evidence base for policy interventions that can reduce the criminalisation of poverty, but this may only be the first step.