Juvenile Delinquency (1948)

From the January 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is well-known that over a very large number of years the figures for Juvenile Delinquency have been constantly rising until, in recent years, they have reached such proportions as to constitute a formidable problem to the Capitalist State.

During the war years complete statistics were not available although what evidence there was showed a sharp increase. More figures, however, are now becoming available.

The “Report of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis for the year 1946” emphasises the seriousness with which the problem is regarded.

The Report (p.38) states “Statistics in age groups of the population within the Metropolitan Police District are not available to facilitate deductions as to the growth of crime among children but comparisons of the number of children arrested in 1946 with the figures for those of similar ages arrested in 1945 and 1938 make it only too clear that juvenile crime is increasing among the very young,” and later, “Nobody can fail to be impressed by the figures showing the large numbers of children up to 16 years old who are engaged in crime: the graphs of ages of persons arrested show very large peaks for these ages.”

The figures for juvenile crime approach very closely the figures for adult crime and the Report says of this (p.39) “Nearly half the arrests for burglary and housebreaking were of persons under 21 years of age and 25 per cent. were persons of not more than 16 years old. As regards shopbreaking, the position was even more deplorable. Two-thirds of the persons arrested were under 21 and 30 per cent, were schoolchildren.” The Daily Telegraph, commenting on this Report, says (11/7/47) “The distressing evidence of a fresh growth of juvenile criminality indicates that crime has no difficulty in enlisting thousands of new recruits each year.”

The figures given refer to the Metropolitan Police District only and it is interesting to note that in the Home Office Circular 807624 (1941), the proportion for the total indictable offences, in 1938, is given as: “committed by adults 21 years and over” 49 per cent., “committed by juveniles under 21 years ” 51 per cent. (36 per cent. of the whole total by those under 17 years of age). Many reports have been made on the subject and a large number of books written on it with, it would seem, every author advocating a different solution to the problem, ranging from the sadistic to the Utopian. More punishment, less punishment, corporal punishment, kindliness, State control of children, removal from environment, treatment by psychologists, punishment of parents, education of parents, more hostels, the abolition of slums—all these and more are the remedies of the reformist and humanitarian authors.

The overwhelming mass of delinquency is “crime” against property and, as the Capitalist system of society is based on the class ownership of the means and instruments of production and distribution, the ownership of private property and the inviolability of that ownership is, of necessity, the prime concern of the Capitalist class and of the State, which functions in the interests of that class. The full resources of law and jurisprudence are directed to the protection of the rights of property ownership and the monstrous machinery for the enforcement of those laws intrudes into, restricts and controls the life of every human being in contact with them.

So well is the conception of the inviolability of private property ownership absorbed into the ideas of society that it has become accepted as an absolute rule and its validity is rarely questioned. Therefore, the violation of these laws, even by children, results in the drastic and summary punishment of the offender.

Should private property ownership rights be violated it becomes of paramount importance to the property owning class to apprehend the violator and, having done so, to use the methods they consider best suited to prevent subsequent violation by that person and as a deterrent to potential violators. In past days society regarded juvenile law breaking as a symptom of inherited wickedness and children were imprisoned, transported or hanged, for their offences and until quite recently the most effective deterrent was considered to be severe punishment including imprisonment and birching. The ruling class have never been particular about the means used to gain their ends, but in the case of juvenile delinquency the results were disappointing to them.

In spite of the severity of punishment the delinquency always increased. Savage sentences neither reformed the delinquent nor served as a deterrent to others, and so the methods of dealing with the delir-qnent juvenile have gradually changed. Imprisonment and corporal punishment have largely given way to the approved or reformatory school where the young delinquents are “taught” rather than whipped.

Much is heard lately of the newest editions of these approved schools, known as rehabilitation centres. These modern institutions rely on a more scientific and psychological treatment of the young, dealing with them more from the angle of children who, because of various unfortunate circumstances, have strayed from the path of rectitude and can be reclaimed. Part of this psychological treatment is in kindlier and more tolerant usage and more freedom.

Reformists will claim that the changing law, the new institutions and the less harsh methods of dealing with the inmates are the results of long years of effort on the part of individuals and institutions interested in the reform of juvenile law and corrective establishments. Whilst it may be true that a large amount of data has been collected by such individuals and institutions on the behaviour and reaction of children to certain forms of treatment, and whilst some of this information may be utilized in these new establishments, it is much more true to say that the State has been forced into using new and somewhat experimental methods because of the failure of the old, and, if these have followed lines advocated by the reformists, it is not from any humanitarian motives but because such methods may offer a better chance of turning the potential criminals into what the State, on behalf of the ruling class want—docile and honest wage-slaves.

One point with regard to the modern corrective institution is invariably stressed—and it is a key to the insolubility of the,problem—that detention in it must be a deterrent to further delinquency and as such, must not be made too comfortable lest the children should prefer to be in it rather than go back to their homes and “live in conditions worse than those which would be tolerated in any place of detention and so find compensation in being punished.” (“Juvenile Delinquency and the Law,” p. 168, A. E. Jones.)

It is a moot point, however, whether the new methods reclaim or deter any greater number of juveniles from criminality than the old. What is certain is that both criminality and juvenile delinquency are increasing in spite of a more mobile and efficient police force using the most up-to-date methods and equipment.

Either method, old or new, of dealing with delinquency, must inevitably fail for the simple reason that neither are dealing with causes but both with effects—the effects of Capitalism and, like other effects of Capitalism, such as poverty, insecurity, ill-health, unemployment and war—the very social conditions that give rise to delinquency—there is no solution within the Capitalist system of society. Juvenile delinquency is the inevitable outcome of a system of society that is based on the class ownership of the means of living and which, as a consequence, determines that the vast majority of society shall be divorced from ownership and shall live in poverty and insecurity all their lives, exploited by a minority in order that they, the Capitalist class, shall have wealth, power and luxury. Juvenile delinquents are, almost entirely, working class children. Therefore poverty, whether absolute or relative, is the common denomination of delinquent juveniles, for from that poverty arise the immediate motives of the delinquency—insecurity, frustration, overcrowding, ill-health, ill-treatment, inhibitions and resentments arising from lack of opportunity for self-expression, feelings of inferiority engendered by their class position and “the perplexities, anxieties, frustrations and fatigue associated with employment, the bleakness of unemployment.” (“Child Welfare Outside the School,” p.201, Michael Kaye).

Whilst it is probable that all investigators into the problem of juvenile delinquency agree broadly upon the fact that the social conditions are the root cause of delinquency, they have no solution to the problem. A few reforms in the treatment of delinquents, a few modifications to the laws dealing with juveniles, a pious hope to mitigate poverty or abolish slums, a call for more opportunities and amenities for youth—these have no reality nor any relationship to the real problem.

Subjected to a Socialist analysis the problem is seen to be a manifestation of the social conditions of the time which, in themselves, constitute and produce crime.

The Socialist sees that the existing social conditions are the result of the class ownership of the means of life, that Capitalist relationships are property relationships, that goods are produced, not primarily for use, but for the purpose of making a profit. That the worker is robbed of the values he creates and gets back only sufficient to enable him to exist from week to week in poverty. That in a world of potential plenty the working class go in need always.

Whilst this system of society remains there will be juvenile, as well as adult, delinquency and crime, and no reforms will alter this. Rather, in spite of reforms, will delinquency increase ever further as the working-class position continues to deteriorate and the social conflicts and class antagonisms of Capitalism become yet more fierce as Capitalism becomes increasingly anti-social and decreasingly able to satisfy the needs of society.

Only the Socialist can offer the solution to this problem, which lies in the abolition of Capitalism and the establishment of Socialism, for when the means of life are commonly owned, there will be no more exploitation of man by man and consequently no poverty, no slums and no overcrowding. No need to steal or lie, to cheat or go hungry, no need to prostitute either body or mind or be overburdened with the cares of the economic struggle for existence because there, will be ample of the means of life for all and each will have free access to them. That is the world that is possible for children if their parents want it, but if the parents fail them then the children become the next generation of wage slaves.

J. R. Hall

50 Years Ago: Borstal Boy (2008)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brendan Behan at the age of sixteen came from Dublin to Liverpool with an I.R.A. “do it yourself kit,” for the purpose of blowing up Cammell Lairds. He was arrested, and after a stay in Walton Detention Prison, Liverpool, was sent for three years to a Borstal Institution in East Anglia. The book (published by Hutchinson) tells of his experiences in these places. (…)

In spite of all the tumult and violence of the book, it has a monastic quality in that nothing of any significance from the outside world ever seeps in. not even the war which was going on at the time is mentioned, in fact, the author never seems to have really noticed it. There is no serious discussion, not even about Ireland. Behan indulges in rodomontade about Irish politics, religion and history, but never indicates that he has any grasp of the underlying economic and factors of Irish history. (…)

Behan at least went to Borstal wearing a slightly glamorised would-be Martyr’s crown. He came out none the worse, perhaps even a little better for it. But what of the mal-adjusted, the misfits and the unfortunates; what happened to them? That, perhaps, is the most disquieting thing of all, but Behan never mentions it.

He has nothing to say against patriotism or nationalism either of the English, Irish or any other variety. He seems to regard many Englishmen as stiff-necked and arrogant, but sees no reason why they should not be either in their native country or to people who come from other countries. But in a world of conflicting national interests, being pro Irish, English or American, means even at the best of times being negatively anti-something else. In the worst times such feelings take on an active and hostile form.

[From book review by E.W., Socialist Standard, December 1958]

Youth crime- what’s to blame? (1993)

From the April 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

  We’re talking about the possible abduction and murder of a two-year old boy. And even in the shock and bewilderment we can’t be left alone. We must endure the media ghouls, the politicians and the self-styled experts on human misbehaviour telling us why it happened and how seriously social order is in peril and that we should trust them to put things to rights.

   We must put up with John Major, forgetting that he promised to be the architect of a “nation at ease with itself’, advising us to understand criminals less and condemn them more. We must swallow hard Rees Mogg’s censure that juvenile crime has its roots in a failure to say our prayers. When we knew what had happened to James Bulger there was an orgy of self-questioning, of doubt and condemnation. But the ghouls and the MPs and the experts were absolutely certain that none of these could refer to them. They were blameless.

The killing of James Bulger was a grisly climax to a developing campaign about youth crime. What with the “joy riders" on the bleak estates of Oxford, Liverpool and Newcastle and the persistent burglars who are too young to be legally locked away there was a popular fear that we were about to submerge beneath a tidal wave of teenage thieves and thugs. So the media bellowed out indignation. on behalf of Mr and Mrs Average Briton. The behaviour experts earned a few pounds by writing articles explaining it all as the effect of lax parents and provocative TV programmes and video games. And the politicians all acted like parliamentary thugs in the hope that thereby they could thieve a bagful of votes.

Competitive

At a time of understandably high emotion it may be difficult to cling to reality but it won’t go away. The popular conception about high levels of crime is often a matter of fashion. At one time Teddy Boys were in fashion; soon they were succeeded by the Mods and Rockers. More recently it was the football hooligans; then the “joy riders". But fashions can be decided by all manner of subjective—and delusional—influences. It can develop its own momentum— which is why the popular press falls over itself to colour and glamourise crime.

Meanwhile, throughout the spasms of modish hysteria, there have been quiet, persistent voices pointing out that the teens are the peak years for getting into trouble with the law and that this may be saying something important about what we really think of this social system. If capitalism can’t assure young people, with their vigour and optimism and lack of inhibition, of a stable future there must be something seriously wrong with it.

Rather than admit the unpleasant realities of the society they try to run, the politicians have been engaged in a sordid competition to bid up the stakes in the Law and Order game. Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke had some unpleasant things to say about young offenders while he promised to set up a series of secure establishments to lock them away. John Major declared a crusade against crime—as if it can be fought—with himself, presumably, on a white charger at its head. Desperate at the prospect of the Tories picking up all the votes on the issue, Labour's Tony Blair showed that he is no slouch at the business, calling on the government to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”.

Harsher

None of the ministers drew attention to the inconvenient fact that the youngsters now coming before the courts—including the two boys charged with murdering James Bulger—have spent most, if not all, of their lives under Conservative government.The Tory party have allowed it to be thought that they alone can be trusted to deal with—in other words, to be tough on— crime.

In their sillier moments they have come close to claiming to be able to wipe it out altogether. But what does it say for them and for their policies that after 14 years of power they are in a panic because the problem is worse than ever and are saying that harsher responses are necessary? After all, if their policies had succeeded we might now be expecting courts to feel able to be more lenient about the few minor offences before them.

And what is to be said about those harsher measures? None of them are new. They have all been tried before and they have all failed before; in fact their only perceptible effect has been to stimulate crime. The provision of secure accommodation for young offenders does not have an encouraging history; the most recent version—the Approved Schools—were often colleges of criminal education, where children quickly learned that to survive they had to be devious or obsequious or violent. They learned to burgle houses, pick pockets, steal cars more efficiently.

And in several infamous examples those children were subject, not to the training in citizenship which Clarke huffs and puffs about but to deliberate abuse, physical and sexual. It was often summed up by the professional criminal, once ruthless but new more reflective, who would say that, for him, Approved School was where it all began.

Conscription

The same can be said about the Borstals, sentences to which were officially called “training". And the same, but even more so, can be said about the Detention Centres, whose “short, sharp shock" regime was so rapturously greeted by the punitive neurotics of the Tory Party.

The policy of the Detention Centres was based on the assumption that by bullying and repressing youngsters who had often been subjected to that kind of treatment all their lives anyway, it was possible to persuade them not to bully and repress others. They were doomed to failure although after being abandoned in the 1970s they were briefly revived by an embattled Willie Whitelaw before being quietly allowed to expire.

So what else is on offer, to repress, discipline or "treat" the young criminal? Well, there has been the predictable demand to bring back conscription, often from men who are stupid enough to be able to filter out the truth of their own memories of National Service. Conscription, they declare over their beer in the local British Legion, would instil respect for authority, discipline, order, cleanliness, short hair and sharply pressed trousers . . .

Leaving aside the fact that the armed forces are not famous for decorous, considerate and law-abiding behaviour, we should bear in mind that when peace-time conscription operated in this country it was often said to be responsible for crime. The post-war crime wave was widely explained as the response of school leavers, knowing that in a few years they would be forced into a mindless existence of square bashing and spit and polish, lacking any ambition other than to be the best burglar in the street.

If there is any evidence about cause and effect of crime it clearly contradicts the theory that harsh punishment persuades people to be law-abiding. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that capitalist society has a selective policy on what is lawful and what is not. Some theft and violence is not only allowed but actually esteemed and rewarded—as any investor should know, as any soldier should know. In such a social system it has to be expected that people will be confused about what is legal and what is outlawed—what is “right" and what is “wrong”.

In the sacred name of profit capitalism murders millions of people every year, in its wars, its famines, through its unnecessary disease. None of this is illegal. Meanwhile, the leaders of this historical horror concentrate on trying the impossible—making the system work without its inevitable problems.

Crime cannot be abolished, any more than the problems which capitalism must produce can be abolished—unless something is done about changing the basis of society. Through the hysteria generated by the death of poor little James Bulger, that is a central fact which must not be lost sight of.

Ivan

No change (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was hardly noticed at the time, but last May the British penal system, which does not have a reputation for moving swiftly with the times, underwent an historic change. As a result, the prospects are that a lot more youngsters will be going to prison than before, which probably gave some excited relief to those who nurture a punitive lust towards young criminality. Like much superficial and irrelevant adjustments, this was called a revolution. In fact it was nothing more than the abolition of the Borstal system and its replacement by something called Youth Custody.

The first Borstal was set up in 1902, in the village of that name in Kent, as an experimental training camp for young offenders. This was greeted as a great humanitarian advance, for the young had traditionally been harshly treated when they broke the law. In the 18th century 90 per cent of offenders who were hanged were under the age of 21; in 1838 Parkhurst was converted from a military hospital to a young offenders' prison, where the shackles and the whip were in regular use. The experiment at Borstal was regarded as a success and the Prevention of Crime Act 1908 (which did not, of course, prevent crime nor even offer any perceptive notion of what it was) gave birth to an entire system of the places.

The draftsmen of the 1908 Act set out the new institutions' objects in ringing terms, dear to the hearts of the legislators of the day:

  . . . places in which young offenders may be given such industrial training and other instruction and be subjected to such disciplinary and moral influences as will conduce to their reformation and the prevention of crime. (Quoted in Justice of the Peace, 19 November 1983).

Nearly sixty years after the Act, the Home Office were sure that these objects were being achieved for the Borstals, they said, were providing ". . . all-round development of character and capacities — moral, mental, physical and vocational . . ." (The Sentence of the Court, 1969: HMSO).

Well, that was not quite how many of the Borstal boys remembered them. One will never forget the immediate assault he was subjected to on his arrival, before he had had time to break any of the rules, to show him what would happen if he did. Another has bitter memories of his first, character-forming, day when he saw a friend beaten because he couldn't wash the floor to an officer’s satisfaction. He was, in fact, in the last throes of leukaemia: when he died, a couple of days later, the governor had the boys assembled to suggest that they might like to contribute to a wreath.

The intention was to model the Borstals on public schools, which were supposed to breed into youths the insular prejudices which had helped subdue so much of the world into the British Empire. They were divided into houses, supervised by people who anywhere else would have been known as prison officers but who in Borstals were called housemasters. There was an emphasis, at least in theory, on house spirit, physical exercise and career training. A lot of money was spent on some of them; one had a library, a sports field and a shed full of racing boats such as might have been the envy of a public school. Others were huge purpose-built complexes with classrooms, workshops and a farm. It was of course useful to display such Borstals to visiting parties of judges and magistrates who were looking for reassurance that they were doing the boys a favour by sending them there. Other Borstals were rather less favoured; they might be converted military camps, some from the Napoleonic Wars; one of these could expect, on a typical day, to have over half its inmates — boys aged between 15 and 21 — to be homeless when they were released to face the rigours of life at what was called liberty. The prospects of such boys were poor; a Home Office Research Bulletin in 1978 found a 60 per cent reconviction rate among homeless ex-prisoners. (Making Good, Martin Wright. Burnet Books, 1982). The main problem facing these boys would have been eradicated if they could somehow have moved upwards into the other class in society, where a housing problem is not known, but no Act of Parliament was ever drafted with that in mind.

There was in fact one way in which the Borstal did provide the best schooling in the country. They were the Oxbridge of criminal education, where boys who had previously bungled their offences could learn how best to steal a car or break into a house. One graduate, now middle-aged, put it something like this:

  When I left Borstal I was 18 and I had to make a choice. I’d learned how to make crime pay; should I go straight or go back at it, only properly this time? When I looked at the profits I could see there was really no choice so I went back at it. Got my own little business together then I packed it in. Till I got tempted with this little lot.

But it was not their futility, nor any violence or corruption about them, which brought about the end of the Borstals; it was simply that, in the eyes of the legislators and of the people who vote for them, they were not doing their job. For the past twenty years or so, a flood of statistics has borne into public awareness the impression that crime is predominantly the act of poor young men from an urban environment. Throughout the period 1972-82 the highest rate of known crime per 100,000 of the population has been in the male age group 14-17 and the next highest in the male age group 17-21. In 1982. the most recent year for which figures are available, the rates were 76 and 73 respectively while for all age groups it was about 22. Even allowing for statistical quirks — for example many of the offences committed by teenagers are by their nature more likely to come to the notice of the police than are some of the more premeditated and sophisticated crimes by adults — the figures give a clear enough picture and it is one of widespread disaffection among the youth of Britain.

Certainly, that was the message reaching the courts, with their daily stream into the dock of youngsters who had taken cars, broken into houses, or picked a pocket. But when the courts came to exact their revenge. they often found their powers restricted by the Criminal Justice Act of 1961. This Act forbade the courts to send anyone to prison, if by their age they were qualified for a sentence of Borstal, for any period between six months and three years, with the intention that a sentence of any intermediate length must entail Borstal training. This was Parliament’s response to the developing problem of juvenile crime, which it hoped to deal with by something officially defined as training rather than with something condemned as punishment. (Those were high days for the theories of social work as a palliative to capitalism's ailments; the inevitable failure of social work has opened the way for a return to a harder policy of restraint and punishment.)

More than one judge, impatient to imprison some miserable, quaking youth, fretted at the restrictions of the 1961 Act; for one thing, Borstal training meant that the Home Office decided when the offender was released, instead of the judge fixing it by the length of sentence. Flower-hatted Tory ladies and puce-faced gentlemen gave vent to their outrage at the apparent indulgence of teenage louts and ne’er-do-wells. Stimulated by a typical media panic, there was a White Paper and a “debate" and then another Act of Parliament. The original noble aims of the Borstal were forgotten and they were quietly put to death; the signs at the gates were replaced with others which proclaimed that what had been a Borstal is now a Youth Custody Centre; new forms were printed; the housemasters went back into uniform and to being called prison officers. In one way or another, judges and magistrates can send youngsters to some sort of prison for whatever time, short or long, they decide — and the signs are that they are happily taking their chance. According to the Guardian of 14 September 1983, in the first two months of the Act's operation the number of inmates aged 15-20 in the Youth Custody Centres increased by about 1,000; a crisis of overcrowding is now looming, to rival that in the adult prisons.

The treatment (for that is what it is called) of offenders is officially judged in terms of its effect on re-offending. No “treatment" method has such a “success" rate that it outdistances the rest and presents a clear economic choice for a government to invest in. No method offers any comfort to the law-makers and this is especially the case with juveniles who are given custodial sentences, for up to 80 per cent of them re-offend within two years of their release (Martin Wright). This says a great deal, not so much about the offenders but about the penal system and the society in which it all happens and which the penal system is supposed to defend.

The legislators and the sentencers — and reformers — turn their attention to the character of the offender, which at least allows them to ignore the character of this society. Crime happens mainly in urban areas because they are the concentrations of population which capitalism set down so that workers could live near the places where they were exploited. The history of this, of the expulsions from the land and the pitiful trek for survival to the towns, is one of extreme cruelty. Urban pressures are different now but in their way they are as fierce and destructive as ever. The towns and cities are places where economic and social alienation is made explicit, where people can lie dead in their homes without anyone knowing, where the homeless skulk through the parks and the streets, dirty and ignored.

Capitalism's social engineers encourage us to escape this fate through an attachment to the family and they have an ideal of this — an inturned. private, passionless unit where appetites and emotions are kept in check to promote our docility in exploitation. Capitalism’s family breeds neurosis as it socialises its children into a passive acceptance of their place as wage slaves. But at the same time this family has little resilience; it breaks under only a slight pressure and when that happens its members are left bewildered and damaged, sometimes to the point of seeing themselves as freakish. Children of one-parent families, for example, can often go through agonies of embarrassment in their relationship with other children who have both a mother and a father at home. An impressive number of such children take the role of social deviants and end up in the dock and with the cell door clanging into place at their backs.

For this is not a social system based on majority human interests. It cannot encourage. nor even manage, any challenge to its basic character; it must respond with discipline and repression. It cannot condone human freedom because to do so would undermine its structure of privilege feeding off poverty.

Almost unnoticed — and so far unmourned — the Borstals have gone now, and there are other places which operate on the same blind and brutal deceptions. Meanwhile capitalism goes on, with its poverty, its repression and its human alienation. “Is there not,” observed Marx, “a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room for the supply of new ones?”

Ivan

Scum (1980)

Party News from the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

A leaflet published by Islington Branch for distribution to cinema audiences at the film. “Scum

“SCUM"—THE NEED FOR A POLITICAL RESPONSE

The film you have just watched depicts the institutionalised brutality which is an inseparable part of the British state machine. The original version was banned as a television play by the 'authorities of the BBC because it was thought to be too one-sided to be shown to a mass audience. If the BBC employed similar editorial standards in the Nine o’clock News we might treat their claim to neutrality as having some meaning. In fact, it is the conscious intention of the media to “entertain” us with the likes of Starsky and Hutch and Porridge rather than let us see progammes which will set us thinking about the kind of society' in which we live.

Having come out of the cinema, aware of what goes on in the name of justice and order, you may conclude that something has to be done. Willie Whitelaw and the Short Sharp Shock Brigade believe that something should be done: they say that those who step out of line should meet with even worse forms of punishment. They justify, in the name of Discipline, the incarceration of inarticulate people who express their anger in acts of violence, mentally retarded people who fall foul of the law and can’t be accommodated in overcrowded psychiatric institutions, people found in the possession of cannabis in what is supposed to be a free society. Such offenders are locked up, humiliated and depersonalised for having the audacity to be born into a society which cannot provide for their human needs. Those who advocate law and order really mean violence in the defence of the.present order; they mean the legal retention of the status quo in which 10 per cent of the population own approximately 90 per cent of accumulated wealth.

Probably most people who watch Scum will not be of the “hang ‘em and flog ’em” mentality. They will be concerned and distressed by what they see. They will be outraged by the brutality which is being tolerated. They will be moved by a sense of hostility to authoritarianism and disregard for human dignity. These feelings are understandable, but liberal sentiments have never solved the problems facing us all. Some may look towards legislative reform to solve the problem—but that, at best can only lead to ‘improved’ borstals, not the abolition of the crime and punishment system itself. But it is clear from the film that it is not how you lock people up, but that you lock them up which is the inhumane act. Some may criticise the borstal system on moral grounds, claiming that it is un-Christian and that if only those in power knew what was happening they would put a stop to it. In fact, the penal system is quite in line with the cruelty and imposed discipline of Christianity, as was shown in the film by the Christian borstal governor. Neither is it true that those in power would be willing to eradicate the conditions and attitudes portrayed in the film. Their main concern is that the working class should stay in line and produce profits for them; if a few of us step out of line we can expect no sympathy from the mighty rulers who depend upon our consent for their power.

Prison and borstal are part of the entire inhibiting structure of the capitalist system. Prisons and borstals exist all over the world, including the so-called socialist countries, because capitalism prevails worldwide. Where there is capitalism there are two classes: those who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth and the majority who produce but do not own the wealth. The legal system—laws, police, courts, prisons, borstals, armies—exist to protect the position of the minority against the majority. As long as this system lasts, so will the violence of the state. The only positive political response is for the majority us to gain control of the state machine for the purpose of abolishing the capitalist system. The only response to the crimes of the state is democratic political revolution. The Socialist Party of Great Britain stands without compromise for Socialist Revolution.

We want a society without laws, without police, without prisons and borstals. We want a society of rational human co-operation. We want a society of common ownership and democratic control of the world around us. Don’t just walk away from Scum feeling indignant and powerless. Put your indignation to a positive use by joining with us in the work of building support for the principles of Socialism.

Islington Branch

Lock up your youngsters (1980)

From the April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like reading off a barometer, it is possible to judge the fortunes of a government by the intensity of its search for a scapegoat. Labour governments between the wars blamed their failures on a conspiracy by international bankers bent on the destruction of a movement dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system of society (yes, we are talking about the likes of Ramsay Macdonald, Jimmy Thomas, Philip Snowden. . .). Times have changed; the last Labour government directed none of its venom at conspiratorial bankers but spent its final months in office castigating the trade unions and any workers who wanted more pay than Denis Healey was prepared to allow them.

Now, the Thatcher government is coming under the first pressures. Policies which the Tories once propounded so confidently have become tentative or are quietly forgotten; dissension among ministers is being leaked to the public; the Chancellor has warned us that we must wait another ten years for the promised prosperity and the standing of the Leader herself is being questioned. Now, as every by-election becomes a nervous uncertainty, the Tories are worriedly trying to rally their support and are producing their own scapegoats.

Just like the Callaghan government, the Conservatives are blaming those same greedy, lazy workers, now urged on by “wreckers” like Derek Robinson. Then there is the Social Security scrounger whose activities, according to one High Court judge (who of course has no knowledge in the matter) are ". . . rife from one end of the British Isles to the other”. Naturally, not all scroungers come under the lash of a judge’s tongue—for example Mark Thatcher, who touted for £10,000 so that he could spend his time driving a motor car.

Now the scapegoat’s whole purpose in life is to submit to being the focus of popular anger and frustration. Particularly well suited to this role is another Tory favourite—the juvenile delinquent. He (most of them are male) is usually less politely described as young thug, hooligan or yobbo. The activities of these youngsters, if we are to believe people like the newspaper reporters, are very much a matter of fashion. A few years ago they seemed to devote themselves to smashing up telephone kiosks and there may well have been a judge then who declared that not one kiosk was in working order from one end of the British Isles to the other. Now, it seems, the delinquents concentrate on displays of violence at football matches (often described as “mindless”—perhaps because, unlike the boorish behaviour or some of the players, it is not lucrative) and mugging frail old ladies on their way home with their pension.

“Short and Sharp”

Well the Tories have been ready for a long time to deal with the young hooligan and their declared policy is to set up two special Detention Centres where the regime will be, in the words of Home Secretary Whitelaw, “brisk”. In these Centres—prisons for young people, really—the treatment will be a “short, sharp shock”, based on the theory that violent tendencies can be checked or even eradicated by counter violence. This argument is not so popular at other times, for example when a government is persuading its workers to exert organised violence on other workers abroad, but never mind. Whitelaw’s policy was met with orgasmically passionate responses on both sides, with the Tories baying their approval and the Lefties and the penal reformers howling their scepticism.

One fact which may well be overlooked is that Detention Centres are not peculiarly Tory inventions. In fact, they were originally set up by a Labour government under the Criminal Justice Act 1948, which established twenty of them, scattered all over England and Wales. Designed to take boys between the ages of 14 and 21, the Centres worked a regime brisk enough to satisfy the most fervent flogger and hanger. An official publication—The Sentence of the Court—A Handbook for Courts on the Treatment of Offenders (1964)—described them in this way:

“The regime in detention centres is brisk and firm; there is a strong emphasis on hard work, and the highest possible standards of discipline and achievement, behaviour and manners are insisted upon. An offender will almost invariably regard detention as a punitive experience.”

What this meant was that the day for the inmates started very early in the morning, when they were dragged from their beds and made to run a five mile course, no matter how unfit they might be. At some centres, a gruesome team system ensured that any flagger was subjected to some pretty physical encouragement from his fellow inmates to finish the course. At one centre (which had been notorious, during the war, as a place where British intelligence officers tortured spies) this course was constructed in a specially humiliating and exhausting way; the boys had to run their five miles up and down between two stakes set 100 yards apart.

Then there was grinding, monotonous work like concrete moulding and metal recovery, with periods of hard physical exercises. Overlaying all this was a ceaseless harassing of the boys, with sadistic prison officers nagging and baiting them until some of them broke. One detainee described it as never being left alone from the moment he got up until he fell asleep at night. The effect of this was that the boys finished their sentences fitter then they had ever been in their lives—but also harder, with a cynical edge and often with the status of a prematurely experienced con.

It is not surprising that the Detention Centres failed to have any special effect on juvenile crime; youngsters did not emerge from their “short, sharp shock" with any resolve never to fall foul of the law again. Many of them progressed through Borstal to prison, to longer and longer sentences. One excuse offered for this was that the courts were not using the Centres as they were supposed to be used; they were sending to detention boys whose lives had been a succession of shocks, to the extent that they were inured to any more. Partly in response to this, the style at the Centres began to change, with less emphasis on the hard physical regime and more on “understanding” the inmate and getting to grips with his problems. As this must have meant getting to grips with the problems of the very capitalist social system it cannot be wondered at, that it proved beyond the wit of the prison officers.

The change in style was set out in a later (1978) edition of The Sentence of the Court: “The regime in the detention centres is intended to be constructive, with firm discipline and a strong emphasis on education . . . the punitive clement of the sentence is regarded as fulfilled by the deprivation of the offender’s liberty.” Whatever satisfaction this relaxation gave to the reformers it had little effect on the inmates. A recent (February) report by New Approaches to Juvenile Crime—a combine of eight bodies dealing with young offenders said that 76 per cent of ex-Detention Centre boys were convicted of another offence within two years. The fact that they are ineffective does little to lessen the popularity of the Centres; between 1969 and 1978 the numbers sent to them rose from 2,288 to 6,303.

Public relations exercise

Whitelaw’s proposals are partly a reaction to this situation, as well as a widespread disillusionment with the “social work”, as opposed to the “penal” approach to crime. But in reality what the Tories are planning is little more than a public relations exercise—the setting up of only two Detention Centres on the original pattern, compared to the twenty which operated in that way before. Even the silliest Tory would not suggest that that is going to have any dramatic effect on the figures of juvenile crime, even supposing that the theories of the floggers had any evidence to support them.

What it does provide, though, is yet another example of the futility and confusion of the reformists’ attempts to deal with capitalism’s problems. Juvenile crime is an ugly sore on society and one which grows increasingly septic. The reformers respond erratically, at one time with repression and at another with some comparative leniency. Fashions come and go; so-called family courts, in which all the family were to sit round a table with the police and the magistrates to thrash out some answers to the young offender’s problems, were once suggested as the final solution (in England and Wales, they never even started). Now the wheel has turned at least part of the circle and punishment becomes popular again. Meanwhile, regardless of what the floggers or the do-gooders may try, the crime figures continue to climb; their cause is beyond the scope of any measures of reform.

It is perhaps useful here to give a consumer’s angle on the issue—an angle which will not impress any Tory conference:

“I wonder how they can forget places like Reading and Portsmouth Borstal recall centres. There will be nothing but brutality there, and it will screw' the majority of kids right up. I went through places like that in the early ’50s and it did me no good. I still have bitter memories of the beatings I received at the remand centre before I reached my teens and it just made me determined, that I would get in first. I am still doing it now, but nobody has ever benefitted from it.”

This man is well qualified to testify to the effects of official, institutionalised violence; his criminal record goes back to his childhood and he is now serving a long sentence for a grave assault. His responses, as he says, have benefitted nobody and he has little more to show for his experiences than a glimmering of social insight:

“The Tories are very strong on Law and Order but it only applies to the working class . . . People must eventually get fed up with the legalised extortion being practised by successive governments. The Mafia don’t extort on the scale that governments do.”

Because the direct victims of crime are often workers—a security guard coshed, a worker’s home broken into—it can easily be overlooked that crime is essentially a threat to the morals and privileges of capitalism. This is a society in which a minority class own the means of living, denying the rest of society access to those means except on their terms the terms of being employed for a wage. This act of historical theft is legalised, solemnised and sanctified by both state and church. The acquisition of wealth by means outside this legality is a crime but workers who are denied, repressed, degraded, who live out lives of frustrating poverty, can hardly avoid breaking capitalism’s law's. Thus crime is an inescapable concomitant of capitalism and will remain with us for as long as the working class allow the private property system to endure.

Pressure to conform

In this, as in all things, workers should keep a cool head. Capitalism responds to crime with repression, whether it be that of the bullying screw or of the wheedling social worker; both have the function of lacing deviant workers into a strait jacket of conformity. The pressure to conform, to accept our lot as exploited, socially inferior wage slaves supporting the parasite class of capitalists is what lies behind the Tories’ hysteria, behind the scapegoating of the young offender and the frothings of judges, police chiefs and magistrates. But the working class don’t need to accept this; the remedy for change is in their hands.

It may not be the best time to point it out to him, but when the prison gate judders shut behind some unfortunate worker he should listen carefully; in the rattle of the keys he will hear the echo of the vote he cast at the last election.

Ivan.

Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy (1958)

Book Review from the December 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan at the age of sixteen came from Dublin to Liverpool with an I.R.A. "do it yourself Kit." for the purpose of blowing up Cammell Lairds. He was arrested, and after a stay in Walton Detention Prison, Liverpool, was sent for three years to a Borstal Institution in East Anglia. The book (published by Hutchinson) tells of his experiences in these places.

He speaks of the filth and brutality which existed at Walton Prison, and there is no reason to disbelieve it. Life in Borstal, however, was much different. In fact, it smacks of Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Gem and Magnet. Chaps played the game - the Borstal game - apart from the occasional cad, house masters and house captains were sports. There were escapades, larkies and some horseplay. In fact, Behan and Co. at Borstal looks rather like Harry Wharton and Co., at Greyfriars. The youthful I.R.A. terrorist even assumed a Borstal school tie attitude, and he said his chinas came to regard the college boys they met via the Rugby field as being something of bounders. Behan also considered that he had a more cultivated and educated mind than the college products.

One of the defects of the book is that the conversation is so loaded or over-loaded with barrack room lingo that it fails to trigger off effectively. In fact, the constant repetition of stereotyped swear words takes on the chant of a litany. If one wants to substitute the soporific effect of counting imaginary sheep-jumping over a stile, then counting the swear-words which appear at such regular and monotonous intervals in the book will prove just effective. One feels that the author exploits the swearing gimick in an attempt to impart a vitality and excitement to the conversation which it often lacks. In any case, bad language is not necessarily a criterion of bad boys, even "good boys" often indulge in it.

Behan himself outswears the wide boys, the screws, toughies and ponces. But surely if one is describing a drug addict one does not have to take dope for the purpose of so doing. He seems naive enough to believe that "wicked words" are the hall mark of masculinity, especially his masculinity, when more often than not they are a bawdy blanket to cover a paucity of effective expression.

In spite of all the tumult and violence of the book, it has a monastic quality in that nothing of any significance from the outside world ever seeps in. Not even the war which was going on at the time is mentioned, in fact, the author never seems to have really noticed it. There is no serious discussion, not even about Ireland. Behan indulges in rodomantade about Irish politics, religion and history, but never indicates that he has any grasp of the underlying economic and political factors of Irish history.

Behan might say that he takes the world as he finds it. But what he finds in it is precious little, although he is often a little precious about it. His characters might be incorrigible and by certain standards a little impossible, but it seems vide the author that they live in the best of all possible worlds. He sees nothing wrong with the world and his only "revolutionary" aim, it seems, to use his own words, is to become a rich red.

Behan at least went to Borstal wearing a slightly glamourised would-be Martyr's crown. He came out none the worse, perhaps even a little better for it. But what of the mal-adjusted, the misfits and the unfortunates; what happened to them? That, perhaps, is the most disquieting thing of all, but Behan never mentions it.

He has nothing to say against patriotism or nationalism either of the English, Irish or any other variety. He seems to regard many Englishmen as stiff-necked and arrogant, but sees no reason why they should not be either in their native country or to people who come from other countries. But in a world of conflicting national interests, being pro Irish, English or American, means even at the best of times being negatively anti-something else. In the worse times such feelings take on an active and hostile form.

Behan's book is of a piece with Behan himself, bumptious, bouncing and bawdy, with a hint of hindsight and flashes of poetry. It is genuinely funny in places, but suffers from repetition. Behan at least has a sense of bubbling humour which pops and fizzes in all sorts of unexpected places and is a refreshing contrast to the "look back in anger," chip on the shoulder, the world owes me a living, writers who have set a literary fashion.

He has himself become rather fashionable, but literary fashions, like women's fashions, change quickly, and unless his future output is more significant than his past and present ones, Behan might easily become an has Behan.

Ted Wilmott