DR. TRUDE SUNDBERG GENDER, RACE & ETHNICITY: ARE WE ALL EQUAL TO THE LAW? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

OUTLINE Looking back at how to look at numbers Unpacking gender statistics Who are the female offenders & what are the trends? Unpacking ethnicity & race statistics What has race & ethnicity got to do with it? Trends & characteristics What does this mean for theoretical explanations & interpreting crime? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

RESPONDING TO ANY STATISTICS 1.What does this number measure? 2.Where does this number come from? 3.What other explanations are there for the claim you’re investigating? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

RESPONDING TO ANY STATISTICS - PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT WHEN WE ANALYSE GENDER & ETHNICITY! 1.A measure is a way of understanding and analysing the world 2.A number is collected by someone - who collects it and how? 3.Are the ways in which we define, construct and collect data impacting our findings on trends? 4.What other explanations are there for the claim you’re investigating? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

PRISON POPULATION OVERALL © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

THE UK COMPARED © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

scotland-and-northern-ireland/2013/info-population-estimates.html UK’S POPULATION © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

GENDER & RACE Dimensions to take into consideration: Offenders & prison populations Different needs of different groups in prison (i.e. women versus men) Different characteristics (age/religion/crime committed)? Types of offenses Who are defined as criminals? Stereotypes & discrimination – criminalisation of the poor? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

GENDER - REPETITION There is a clear difference between men and women with respect to the nature, frequency, level, continuation, and reasons for criminal activity. Male offending has been subject to a greater level of theory based on everything (from race, class, age, intellect, peers, family background, genetics etc.) apart from gender. Gendered explanations, however, were predominantly used to indicate the abnormality of women’s criminality. © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

PRISON POPULATION: 85,567* *As of Friday 20 th Feb Source: prison-watch/ (accessed 23/02/2015) prison-watch/ © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

GENDER / CRIME TYPE © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

GENDER & CRIME: ESTABLISHING THE LINKS Around 80% of all known offenders are men. Men outnumber women across all the major crime categories – burglary, robbery drug offences, criminal damage or violence against the person – between 83% and 94% of offenders are male (National Statistics, 2006). 80% of women offenders have criminal careers lasting less than 1 year (55% for male offenders) Most known female offending is at the minor end of the spectrum © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

SPECTRUM (MALE: BLUE / FEMALE: RED) Minor Major Men evident / represented across the spectrum Non-payment of fines rape Handling stolen goods paedophilia Drugs offencesmurder Minor assault armed obbery Women localised here Tail off with the more serious the offence © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

MORE WOMEN IN PRISON? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

WHO ARE THESE WOMEN? “So many prisoners – especially women – arrive in prison suffering the extreme health and social effects of poverty, addictions and physical and sexual abuse, surely, in the name of social justice (or, less grandly, human compassion) it is desirable that one objective of imprisonment be to ensure that prisoners are released from prison in a better state than when admitted”. (Carlen, 2002b, 0Conviction%20the%20rise%20of%20the%20women's%20remand%20p opulation.pdf) © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

UK’S POPULATION © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

ETHNIC GROUPS, 2001 – 2011, ENGLAND AND WALES © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

PRISON POPULATION & ETHNICITY © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

PRISON POPULATION & ETHNICITY © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

British national prison population, 11% are black and 6% are Asian. For black Britons this is significantly higher than the 2.8% of the general population they represent. Overall black prisoners account for the largest number of minority ethnic prisoners (50%). At the end of June 2012, 29% of minority ethnic prisoners were foreign nationals. According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, there is now greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons in the UK than in the United States PRISON POPULATION & ETHNICITY © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

EXPOSURE TO CRIME /rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/rdsolr2506.pdf © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

OFFENDERS BY ETHNICITY © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

WHO DO THE POLICE STOP? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

‘Since 1995, per head of population in England and Wales, recorded stops and searches of Asian people have remained between 1.5 and 2.5 times the rate for white people, and for black people always between 4 and 8 times the rate for white people.’ Stop & Search © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

Stop & Search © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

RACIAL DISCRIMINATION Paul Gilroy (1987): – There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack – The Myth of Black Criminality Racial discrimination argument is supported by others - Hall et al (1978) and Gordon (1988: 311): “the association of black people with crime so firmly made by the police and sections of the mass media and the criminalisation of black people by the agencies of the criminal justice system have become central to racist ideology” © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

‘RACIALISATION’ “The process by which a particular group, or its characteristics or actions, is identified as a collectivity by its real or imagined phenotypical characteristics, or ‘race’. More broadly, the ways in which social structures and ideologies become imbued with ‘racial’ meanings” (Murji 2006: 334) © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

CULTURAL FACTORS Lea & Young (1982, 1984) Critique of tabloid newspaper article (early 1980s) ‘BLACK CRIME SHOCK: Blacks carried out twice as many muggings as whites in London last year’ Analysis of the crime statistics: ‘Blatant moral hysteria’ New realist perspective – Intra-class & intra-racial – Media & the left operate within ideological frameworks which highlight inter-racial rather than intra-racial crime Identified problem of black criminality as laying with conflict between 1st & 2nd generation (also see Fitzgerald, 1998) © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

CRITICAL RACE THEORY Critical approach to analysing the intersection and effects of law, society, race and power. Socially constructed power and privilege offer advantageous structures and opportunities to dominant groups at the expense of minority or marginalised groups. Group identity becomes key: individualisation eschewed in light of prejudicial stereotypes. – i.e. does the act of one white man speak for ‘white men’? – Why, then, are entire Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities held accountable for the actions of a few? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

EXAMPLES OF RACIALISATION IN CRIMINOLOGY Role of the media & authorities (police) in defining street crime or mugging as activities characteristic of young black men (Hall et al, 1978) Police’s continuing use of racialised statistics on street crime to justify stop and search of racial minorities Stigmatisation of particular black sub-cultural styles Media & police constructions of a distinctively ‘Asian’ criminality Demonisation of ‘Islamic terrorists’ Racialisation of whiteness - white criminal underclass, ‘white trash’, ‘chavs’ Historical persecution of Irish (particularly during ‘the Troubles’) © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

USE THEORY WHEN RESPONDING TO ANY STATISTICS 1.What does this number measure? 2.Where does this number come from? 3.What other explanations are there for the claim you’re investigating? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

A CRITICAL VIEW - FROM USA “Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth are portrayed as the purveyors of violence, traffickers of drugs, and as envious of commodities that they have no right to possess. Young black and Latina women are represented as sexually promiscuous and as indiscriminately propagating babies and poverty. Criminality and deviance are racialized. Surveillance is thus focused on communities of color, immigrants, the unemployed, the undereducated, the homeless, and in general on those who have a diminishing claim to social resources”. d_Racism_ADavis.html © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

government/2014/11/27/cornell-west-the-end-of- the-age-of-obama/ government/2014/11/27/cornell-west-the-end-of- the-age-of-obama/ A CRITICAL VIEW - FROM USA © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

Gender & Race © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

GENDER & RACE In June 2007, there were five times more black British national prisoners in prison compared with their white British counterparts The proportion of black prisoners relative to the population was 7.4 per 1,000 compared with 1.4 per 1,000 for white prisoners), and twice as many (3.6 per 1,000) mixed ethnicity prisoners compared with white prisoners (Ministry of Justice, 2008). 29% of women in prison were from a black and minority ethnic background. Of the British national population, 81% were white and 19% black and minority ethnic. 25% of the women’s prison population were foreign nationals, with the largest proportion from Nigeria and Jamaica (33% of the foreign national population). © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

57% of BME women were imprisoned for drug offences, compared with 27% of white prisoners. The proportion of black British women imprisoned for drug offences (42%) was almost twice the proportion of white British women (25%). Of the proportion of women imprisoned for drug offences: 65% were British nationals (73% of whom were white and 26% black and minority ethnic) Drug offences & ethnicity hand in hand? © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

White women higher prevalence of drug misuse and different patterns of misuse than some black and minority ethnic women offenders. Particularly heroin, tranquillisers, amphetamines and cocaine, and also reported significantly higher rates of psychological dependence (Borrill et al, 2006). Marked ethnic difference in dependence, with 60% of white women being dependent on at least one drug, compared with 29% of black/mixed race British nationals: Significantly fewer black and minority ethnic women said that they had problems with drugs on arrival than their white counterparts (18% compared with 41%). The same pattern occurs when comparing foreign national women with British national women (14% compared with 38%) Different problems amongst female offenders © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

MIXING IT UP © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

MIXING IT UP © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015

KEY POINTS Question the statistics - remember the 3 questions Differences men vs. women Types of crime, trends and characteristics Differences between and within ethnicities! Inter and intra group differences Critically investigate the way problems are constructed, measured and perceived © University of Kent Q-Step Centre 2015