Why Not Use Norway’s Example?

Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, asks why the British response to the recent riots has been so authoritarian, when the opposite approach has been proven to work better:

Equally sparse as full consideration of the causes of the violence has been any serious attempt to ask how we should treat those who participated in it. Many are deeply unsympathetic characters that it is easy to want removed from sight, but if we want to prevent future problems we need to be guided by reason, not rage. Norway effectively abolished incarceration as a punishment and reconceived prisons instead as rehabilitation centres built on principles of human rights, and rates of reoffending are a third of the UK’s. Again, it can be an example to us.

Most people in Britain are not lawless rioters, and the crowds who turned out on cleanups are probably more representative of the majority. But we have clearly allowed significant alienation to develop in our society and it is in all our interests to address the causes of it. We need reason and a rigorous scientific approach to diagnose the immediate and underlying causes of violence. We need the courage to be rational and not vengeful in eliminating those causes: inequality, poor urban environments, underemployment. We need empathy and humanity to deal with those people who are the symptom of our problems in a way that will rehabilitate rather than further victimise them. A society that will brutalise and neglect, then discipline and punish those that it has made brutish and negligent is not one in which any person can live happily and safely for long.

Britain however has deeply authoritarian attitudes built into its social fabric, the extent of which has shocked me in the post-riots desperation to condemn first and ask questions never. Copson’s argument is completely logical and sound, yet the British public is disproportionately happy with disproportionately harsh sentencing. Cameron knows it, is taking advantage of it, and indeed it’s hardly surprising that he should, as Naomi Klein points out:

But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

Cameron’s response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.

There is a desperate need to change our attitudes to those who have been economically neglected, but as John Pilger points out, that narrative simply isn’t on the table:

As MPs lined up to bay their class bigotry and hypocrisy in parliament, barely a handful spoke this truth. Not one of the heirs to Edmund Burke’s 18th-century rants against “mob rule” by a “swinish multitude” referred to previous rebellions in Brixton, Tottenham and Toxteth in the 1980s, when Lord Scarman reported that “complex political, social and economic factors” had caused a “disposition towards violent protest” and recommended urgent remedial action. Instead, Labour and Liberal bravehearts called for water cannon and everything draconian. Among them was the Labour MP Hazel Blears. Remember her notorious expenses? None made the obvious connection between the greatest inequality since records began, a police force that routinely abuses a section of the population and kills with impunity, and a permanent state of colonial warfare with an arms trade to match: the apogee of violence.

We haven’t quite become a Tea Party nation, but our attitudes have similarly been shaped by the right wing media over the last generation to believe overwhelmingly that these people are somehow different – ‘feral’ some have said. We don’t need to look at any political, social or economic factors – this, we’re told, is down to a different type of human being – one not like the rest of us. Of course this dehumanisation suits both the tabloid press and right wing politicians (by which I include New Labour), but until we’re prepared to challenge this entirely false narrative as a nation, and reject a judicial paradigm which is clearly failing, this problem isn’t going to go away; it’ll get much worse.