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This month, Transform Justice and the Howard League for Penal Reform issued figures obtained through freedom of information requests which showed that 87% of children on remand in London are from black or minority ethnic backgrounds. Yes, you read that right – NINE OUT OF TEN children in London held in prison to await trial are people of colour. The proportion of Londoners from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background is around 44%, so why this huge increase in the youth remand population? How you phrase the answer to this question is, in our view, crucial.
The youth justice system has talked for a long time about ‘disproportionality’ – a clunky term, and one which implies that there are proportions which would somehow be correct. The Youth Justice Board has recently moved to using the term ‘over-represented groups’ which again is disgracefully euphemistic. This use of language suggests that the problem is here is about numbers; about glitches in the data. Let’s say this now, loudly enough to be heard right up there in the ivory towers of governmental Quangodom: THE YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEM IS RACIST.
It’s a bold statement, and one which practitioners in any part of the system may find uncomfortable. But you don’t get a situation in which nine out of ten kids banged up are black, by accidents of data. The system has outcomes which are racist. This can only happen if the structures of justice are systemically racist.
Now this doesn’t mean that you, caring retired person volunteering as a magistrate in north London from a sense of civic duty; nor you, keen young police officer starting out with the Met with aspirations to make society safer; nor you, inner London YOT worker writing analysis of the child’s traumatic experiences into your PSR – are racist people. Within the limits of your role, you may be doing your utmost to maximise positive outcomes for the children with whom you interact. But you are doing so within a system which is racist. It’s a system in which, this week, police officers have been sacked for disgusting racist (and sexist, and homophobic) behaviour towards colleagues. It’s a system in which black boys are routinely dismissed as ‘streetwise’ and safeguarding actions closed, for this only to emerge in the enquiry after they are brutally murdered. It’s a system in which black children are three times as likely to be permanently excluded from school than white children; and one in which eight out of ten people stopped and searched by the Met are black. It’s hardly any wonder that, by the time the child has reached the courts, he is resistant, intransigent and expects to be unfairly treated. He has been, since the moment he was born.
We can’t address the problem unless we name it. Language which minimises the issue and the factors which lie behind the outcomes; is collusive and makes the user complicit in the cover up. This isn’t ‘racial disparity’, or ‘over representation’. This is racism, and we are losing a generation of our black children to its effects. This week’s remand statistics have to act as a wake-up call: say its name. The justice system is RACIST. Only by acknowledging the immensity of the task, can we begin, together, to undertake it.