A report has found there are proportionally more black people jailed in Britain than in the United States, writes RANDEEP RAMESH
THE PROPORTION of black people in prison in England and Wales is higher than in the United States, a landmark report released yesterday by the Equality and Human Rights Commission reveals.
The commission’s first triennial report into fairness in Britain shows that the proportion of people of African-Caribbean and African descent incarcerated is almost seven times greater than their share of the population. In the United States, the proportion of black prisoners to population is about four times greater.
The report says that ethnic minorities are “substantially over-represented in the custodial system”. It suggests many of those jailed have “mental health issues, learning disabilities, have been in care or experienced abuse”.
Experts and politicians said over-representation of black men was a result of decades of racial prejudice in the criminal justice system and an overly punitive approach to penal affairs.
“People will be and should be shocked by this data,” said Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust. “We have a tendency to say we are better than the US, but we have not got prison right.”
Lyon said that although there had been “numerous efforts to address racism in the prison system . . . we have yet to get a better relationship between justice authorities and black communities. Instead we have . . . mistrust breeding mistrust”.
On the streets, black people were subjected to what the report describes as an “excess” of 145,000 stop and searches in 2008. It notes that black people constitute less than 3 per cent of the population, yet made up 15 per cent of people stopped.
The commission found that five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned. The ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade – from 11,332 in 1998 to 22,421 in 2008. Over a similar period, the overall number of prisoners rose by less than two-thirds. The commission says that the number of people behind bars accelerated in the last decade despite “a similar number of crimes being reported to the police as in the early 1990s”.
A quarter of the people in prison are from an ethnic minority. Muslims also now make up 12 per cent of the prison population in England and Wales.
Some on the left of Labour blame its policies while in power. Diane Abbott, who as a backbencher raised the alarm over the growing numbers of jailed black men, said she “very much regretted that the last Labour government swallowed [former Tory home secretary] Michael Howard’s line that ‘prison works’. There was never a serious examination of the consequences of locking up a generation of young black men. The result is there are some prisons in the southeast which are now virtually all black. Many are converting to Islam,” she said.
The problems may start at school. The commission points out that black children are three times as likely to be permanently excluded from education.
“We are reaping the effects of criminalising a community in the 1970s,” said Ben Bowling, professor of criminal justice at Kings College London. “The question is how you break the cycle when young men experience custody. Three-quarters simply reoffend. We have to intervene with families more effectively to stop kids going to prison . . . You need to deal with issues like mental health and substance abuse.”
England and Wales have an imprisonment rate of 155 per 100,000. This contrasts with rates of less than 100 per 100,000 for most of Britain’s neighbours.