The Notion of the Care Experienced Criminal
The parts of the state that provide welfare and the parts of the state that provide punishment are deeply intertwined and interdependent. Both respond to similar pressures and work to ensure social order. This is especially paramount for Care Experienced people, who are the children of the state.
As Becka Hudson wrote in her essay ‘Statues and Gangs: Fascist Panic and Policing,’ “state abandonment and state violence are a couple.” Many Care Experienced people face both. Looked After Children are too often abused once taken into Care. Between 2009-12, an average of 450-550 cases of abuse within Foster Care and 250-300 cases of abuse within Residential Care were tracked and proved by academics. Unfortunately, the unreported number could be much higher. Alongside this, many Looked After Children and Care Leavers are neglected by the state. This includes, but is not limited to, people being housed in trailers or bedsits without support from age 16, being housed far away from anything or anyone they know, not feeling ready to leave Care, not knowing independent living skills or how to get support for their mental health, not receiving support for finding a job or staying in education and a plethora of risks being overlooked. The state abandonment then extends to the barriers Care Leavers and Care Experienced people face in employment (22% of Care Leavers aged 27 are employed and those that are have an average pay gap of £6,000), housing (25% of England’s homeless population are Care Experienced and a third of Care Leavers become homeless within the first two years of leaving Care), education (41% of Care Leavers aged 19-21 are out of education, employment and training and only 13% of Care Leavers attend higher education by their 19th birthday), healthcare (Care Experienced people are 360% more likely to die prematurely and more likely to die of unnatural causes such as violent deaths, suicide and accidents and 45% of Looked After Children have a mental illness, whilst Care Experienced people are 4-5 times more likely to attempt suicide into adulthood) and loving relationships (1 in 5 Care Leavers report feeling lonely always or most of the time). After enduring all that, Care Experienced people are heavily criminalised. Looked After Children are 8 times more likely to receive a youth justice caution or conviction than our peers. This is 33% of Looked After Children, compared to just 4% of our peers. This number rose when the Looked After Children weren’t white. 25% of prisoners were Care Experienced of any age over 18, whilst 16% of this number reported having had more than 6 placements whilst in Care.
Returning more broadly to the police; with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s came a radical fundamental change in Britain’s social foundations. This included many of the economic conditions that were favourable to welfare provisions that helped maintain social order. From the 1980s onwards, the political emphasis focused more on social control than providing social provision, which led to an increase in crime rates. Whilst funding for support services was cut, the cost of criminalising people bloated. In 2017, it cost £449 to keep someone in custody for 12 hours. In 2021/22 it cost £46,696 per person to be imprisoned for a year. In 2018, an average day of court costs £2,692. Whilst being very costly, criminalisation also does not solve the underlying issues and often exacerbates them. Experiencing the criminal justice system at any level is often traumatic, which can cost the state in terms of therapy, and self-harm behaviours either directly (such as eating disorders, cutting, burning or suicide attempts) or indirectly (through drug or alcohol dependency). Either due to mental illness or having to miss work due to being arrested and court dates, employment may be lost, costing the state through unemployment or sick benefits. If someone receives a criminal record or whilst a case is ongoing (which can take years) legitimate means are removed or reduced. This essentially means that those facing an ongoing criminal trial or who have a criminal record may find it harder to attend education, find employment, find housing, volunteer, or maintain or form social support networks. Removing legitimate opportunities pushes people towards further crimes. Short prison stays have a particular danger of this, where the prison stay is long enough for someone to lose their job and their home.
As well as reducing and removing the positive aspects of the state, the response to crime saw a massive ideological shift from a penal-welfare state that looked at rehabilitation and support to one focusing on punishment. This rise of penal popularism also saw a more emotive response to crime and strengthened the role of the victim in the media and then political discourse. Rehabilitation programmes were questioned on ethical, as well as economic, grounds and the focus moved more and more towards intense policing, harsher sentencing, a smaller role of rehabilitation and the privatisation of what rehabilitation systems remained. A moral panic about crime and in particular racialised crimes worsened the issue. The police increasingly worked to monitor communities before crimes happened, based on stereotypes and assumptions about which communities committed crimes. The police shape people’s experience of the world by on whom they choose to use the weapons at their disposal; offering themselves as protectors to the privileged, who tend to be affluent, able-bodied, cis-het white men, whilst conducting raids, stop-and-searches and harassment to those deemed other, who tend to be homeless, transgender or gender non-conforming, BAME, sex workers, addicts, those from low socio-economic background, those struggling with mental illness, and those disabled and Care Experienced. These groups face double discrimination when othered by the police; both the threat from the police themselves and the lack of protection from the police when the harm comes from others. The overarching reach and power of the police makes them a similar threat to social services and Children’s Homes. They routinely invade the most intimate parts, and every aspect, of our lives and fail to acknowledge the specific violation of this. It leaves a unique kind of vulnerability and trauma in its wake. A key way the police can get away with these abuses of power is through the ideology of crime reduction and the moral panic of the notion of ‘the criminal.’ The violence and exclusion towards these vulnerable groups is accompanied by the claim of paternalistic care and protection, by ‘protecting’ people from the ‘dangerous’ other group.
It is worth noting here that crime is an artificial social construct. What is legal or illegal is decided by people. There are many things that are harmful that are legal and many things that are not harmful that are illegal. Part of the police’s job is to maintain social control, so often they classify something as illegal to make their stopping it seem legitimate. This can be seen currently in the UK with the increasing criminalisation of protests. Another example of the rhetoric of legality being used to defend the status quo dates back to the late 19th century when The Legitimation League campaigned to remove the stigma towards children born out of wedlock. However, this challenge to the status quo drew the attention of the Special Branch, which eventually destroyed the movement. One function of criminalisation is to remove legitimacy from that person or group through state-sanctioned othering. The social stigma and moral judgement associated with the notion of the criminal form a label used to discredit them. If that doesn’t work, a criminal record can exclude someone from education, reducing their ability to access the discourse needed to academically articulate their experiences. This also serves to widen the gap in the inequality between those whom the police choose to protect and those whom the police choose to abuse and harass. Care Experienced people are already often excluded from these spaces, making them an easier target for the police. We often already have many of the same negative associations as criminals projected onto us. We’re often treated as pre-criminals. When councillors or residents refuse or object to the building of Children’s Homes in their communities, they are placing judgement on those in Care. The local police force have even been known to pass warnings on building Children’s Homes. This is treating Children’s Homes as pre-criminal spaces, where no crimes have been committed, but it is assumed they will be. It is assumed the children that will live in these homes will be criminals, simply for having been taken into Care. There are many things wrong with this assumption. The confidence in which councillors and police, who are the Corporate Parents of Looked After Children and Care Leavers, publicly voice their disdain for their Corporate Children is reflective of the public acceptance of that disdain. Whenever our Corporate Parents feel comfortable saying we’re not wanted and only destined to be future criminals, it is harder to have a positive self-view. That’s not right. I would like everyone- Care Experienced or not- to fully understand that this is not okay or professional.
Part of the notion of the criminal is a passing of judgement on who ‘deserves’ support and acceptance and who deserves to be abandoned and sent elsewhere. There are an infinite number of examples of when Looked After Children, Care Leavers and Care Experienced People are treated as different or have judgements such as these passed on us. Sarah Lamble explores a similar theme of how harm is rarely done in a vacuum and the link between child trauma and later criminalisation in their essay ‘Practising Everyday Abolition.’ Though they doesn't focus on Care Experienced people, much of their essay can be used to understand our lives and the violent experiences we’ve often endured. Lamble stresses the importance of non-punitive and holistic ways to address the root of the behaviour, rather than simply punishing and increasing the exclusion and vulnerability of those who did it. The police are another form of violence and you can’t solve violence by adding more violence. When people are in the criminal justice system, they’re often portrayed as agents of harm who cannot also be victims of harm, when the two are not mutually exclusive and can very easily go together. In the case of Care Experienced people, part of treating us solely as agents of harm is probably because if the state admitted we’re often the victims of harm, they would need to acknowledge they failed us. They refuse to legitimise their own violence against us and then after having punished us through their neglect, they punish us if we don’t know how to cope legitimately.
There have been steps to reduce the over-criminalisation of Care Experienced people, but I don’t think they go far enough and don’t do enough even to acknowledge the abuse by police. All across Britain, there needs to be a shift from criminal to social justice, and there needs to be a radical return to providing people with a community, support structures and the resources to meet their basic needs as an alternative to policing. The criminal justice system posits punishment as the natural consequence of unwanted behaviour, and places the problem with the individual, rather than taking a holistic approach. In most cases, those labelled as criminals are products of the state’s failure to support its citizens, which is especially so when it comes to Care Experienced people. When we do something outside the law, it’s often a mirror of the state’s abandonment, which they respond to with state violence. Instead of taking the time to reflect or respond to what led to that behaviour, they make the situation worse with punishment. The war on crime is lazy, and will make the situation worse. We need to instead practise everyday abolition and respond with love-centred accountability.