‘There were calls for a serious look at our economic system.’ Photo: by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
Prisoners and conscience: Hugh McMichael on poverty
‘When might we stop rating our country on its Gross Domestic Product and turn to measures of happiness?’
I recently attended a symposium at Birmingham University, visiting as a former prison chaplain. The law in England and Wales does not permit imprisonment for debt. But if a debtor fails to obey a magistrate’s order for payment, they can be imprisoned for contempt of court. A magistrate may make an order for payment in someone’s absence and without knowledge of any individual’s circumstances. Many of those imprisoned for non-payment are young single parents – especially mothers.
The discussion at the symposium broadened to other links between poverty and imprisonment. There are two published statistical measures of poverty: social security payments and free school meals. Almost three quarters of all imprisoned men have received social security payments prior to imprisonment. Then, rates of imprisonment from various ethnic communities relate to free school meal use. People of Indian ethnicity have the lowest rate of incarceration and free school meals, while travellers have the highest for both. Furthermore, half of imprisoned men were seriously abused as children.
Awareness of these links merged into discussion of the wealth gap in the UK. There are many ways of expressing UK wealth distribution but half of the population lives on nine per cent of the nation’s wealth. This nine per cent is the same total wealth as held by the richest 60,000 (or 0.1%) of the population. This means that an income of (say) £100 per week at one end contrasts with a weekly income of £50,000 at the other. How can such inequalities be ethical or justifiable? And how much of that wealth derives from employing labour at rates which lead to poverty?
The symposium took place during a rail strike, and there was anticipation of more industrial unrest this summer. Meanwhile political moves are afoot to remove business regulations – often protecting workers – that had been imposed by the EU. Meanwhile our legal rights to protest have diminished.
Faced with all this, there were calls for a serious look at our economic system.
Democracy itself is distorted by the influence of wealth in spreading selective information, particularly in media ownership. And British wealth substantially originated in slavery and colonisation.
How can we avoid getting political? How can we ignore the systemic factors that lead to such inequality? When might we stop rating our country on its Gross Domestic Product and turn to measures of happiness? We know poverty causes unhappiness but, after people have ‘enough’, happiness does not increase with more wealth. Do we care about our under-privileged poor, and especially those who finish up in prison?
