“Prison spaces”
Boris Johnson chose to announce his flagship “law and order” policies in the Mail on Sunday, a paper in which comment tends from “lock them up and throw away the key” to “bring back hanging”, with every brutal fantasy of corporal punishment getting a frequent airing too. Johnson made a promise of an extra “10,000 spaces in our prisons”. This curious euphemism is meant to highlight funding going towards a half-crumbling, half-privatised prison estate, within which prisoners are subject to all manner of abuse, violence, neglect, and overcrowding. “10,000 spaces in our prisons” sounds like the rare pleasure of being able to afford a house with a spare room. But the political calculation is otherwise: that Johnson can make himself popular with several million people by promising to send tens of thousands of other people to prison. Only, to promise of future incarceration of so many people, who have not yet committed any crimes, looks a little too much like promising some ritual sacrifice to ward off the evils of the present. As though the goat will appreciate a new shiny altar as it’s led to its death.
“The Public”
Alongside a programme of expanded mass incarceration, he announced the extension of stop and search powers across over 40 cities in an attempt to soothe the public’s worries about increases in knife crime. There he wrote,
“I want the criminals to be afraid – not the public.”
The division is stark. “Criminals” and “the public” are held firmly apart. Separation is the entire logic of this juridical strategy: criminals must be distanced from the public not only rhetorically but in reality too. It is a carceral logic, one that wagers on punishment over remedy, while knowing that the most severe punishment – the most gratifying punishment it can offer to those who yearn for “law and order” – is excommunication from the body politic.
Such a sentence also contains three dubious implications: firstly that on committing a crime you can expect not to be considered a member of the public, and that politicians no longer have any duty to serve you; secondly, only those who are not criminals themselves can be expected to be protected from crime, or to have their fears addressed by the state; and thirdly that those subject to the force and violence of these expanded tactics are already “criminals”. The last of these suggestions is particularly spurious given that the powers being offered to police officers allow stopping and searching a person “whether or not he has any grounds for suspecting that the person or vehicle is carrying weapons or articles of that kind.”
Policies such as this are not about making the public less afraid, but more afraid. Throughout his campaign to become Prime Minister, Boris falsely proclaimed knife crime as the core violence in our society. The effect was to make middle class rural and suburban white people afraid of young black urban boys and men. He reinvented the “folk devil” of black urban youth, in order to terrify people who live miles away from any urban centre, and who have little understanding of the everyday lives of people who inhabit them – lives as much full of joy as hardship, as full of striving as of difficulty, as full of fruitful collectivity and solidarity as they are subject to forces of division and competition. It’s the same as how, during the Brexit referendum, fear of immigrants was whipped up in those places where no immigrants live.
Yet victims of knife crime are not middle class white suburban Daily Mail readers, but instead predominantly young urban boys and men, most of them people of colour, poor, deprived, brutalised by society and the state, living in a world in which any aid and support has been cut away. Far from protecting young black urban boys, who are truly the victims of knife crime, far from making their lives safer, this policy will embolden racist police officers and institutionally racist police forces to attack them. Precisely those who need protecting are cast through presupposition as “the criminals” and not “the public.” All the while those middle class white folk will feel a little safer. But they don’t feel safer because they are less afraid: they feel safer because they are more afraid, and can now proclaim that something is being done about it. Never mind if that something is arbitrary violence, surveillance, harassment and criminalisation of racialised sections of the public, who are already the true victims of the violence whose fear they adopt. Never before has vicarious feeling been so craven. Like the old image of a person looking from safety out of their window at the violence of a storm, Boris’s exercise in bourgeois sublimity aims not to alleviate fear but to politicise it.
And this is without mentioning that as a police tactic “stop and search” not only does not work, but has a monumentally chequered history. These powers have long been used by racist police officers and institutionally racist police forces to target and harass young black people. The section 60 powers that are to be used more frequently were (apparently) designed as a response to violent crimes involving weapons, but 97% of stops made under the act result in no prosecution for charges involving violent crimes or weapons. By far the most arrests after a search are for minor non-violent crimes, and even more stops and searches result in no action at all. At present black people in England and Wales are 40 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people are.
The expansion of Section 60 powers has its own dubious history. The act has slippery wording in which its powers can be enforced in “any locality” in which violence has occurred or is likely to occur: during the riots in 2011, caused by the arbitrary police killing of a young black man in Tottenham, a section 60 was put in place across the whole of London (the largest area over which such an order has been put in place.) Expand the definition of “locality” enough and you can always map an area in which some violence has taken place. Then bring out the white hordes, holding brooms aloft triumphant, and say to the police, “go forth and brutalise.”