On Foreign Prisoners and Xenophobia

Is there any problem with the way that the ‘foreign prisoners’ issue has been discussed in most of the media in the UK? In my view, emphatically, yes. Is it an appropriate policy response to the accusation of not having competently managed the existing procedures for managing the deportation or release of foreign prisoners for Clarke and Blair to suggest a tougher regime’? Emphatically, no.However, before discussing these points, and to avoid any misunderstandings, there are several preliminary points to be got out of the way:

1. It is indeed the primary duty of the Home Secretary in the UK to protect the public in this country. He has failed in this duty, and even if some of the failures occurred under someone else’s watch, if there is any meaning to ministerial responsibility, then he must resign. This is all the more so if incompetence has occurred because politicians have heaped a whole pile of not necessarily consistent policy objectives upon civil servants and have failed effectively to manage any necessary change in culture or practices. Sometimes ministers should remember that it is not essential to be leading permanent revolution in their ministries, but instead should devote themselves to the boring business of running their bit of the country properly. Competence is all we ask for.
2. Those who have been convicted of crimes, whatever the colour of their passport, should be punished in an appropriate and proportionate way, and in that context the position of victims is an important voice to be heard.
3. It is certainly true that, subject to human rights and humanitarian norms to which states such as the UK have signed up, all states have the power, within the context of immigration laws to order the deportation of persons deemed undesirable for a variety of reasons, including public order and public policy reasons related to the commission of crimes. In states such as the UK, such orders are judicially reviewable.
4. Foreign prisoners are not currently treated equally within UK prisons. They are not the targets of rehabilitation programmes. Perhaps some of them should not be. That would be a waste of time. But perhaps, equally, some of them should be.
5. Even those who have committed crimes and have been convicted of those crimes are fellow humans, deserving of appropriate treatment within humanitarian norms. I am emphatically not in the hang ‘em and flog ‘em camp. But then you never thought I was, did you?

So what are the problems that I see in the media coverage? And why are Clarke and Blair wrong to suggest that the right way out is a ‘get tough on foreign prisoners’ policy?

Too much of the media coverage has lumped together all ‘foreign prisoners’ as if they were a single group distinguished only by their degree of danger to the ‘British’ public, a conclusion which may or may not be able to be easily discernible from the seriousness of the offence for which they were convicted. This is clearly wrong. They are distinguished by all sorts of factors intrinsic to themselves such as gender, age, parental status, race, nationality, and so on. In addition, they are very strongly to be distinguished according to their immigration status in the UK (e.g. whether their only contact with the UK was to try to import some illegal drugs, or whether they were lawfully and perhaps long term resident in the UK, and are with or without family in the UK). Some people in the group of long term residents are probably people who could properly have taken out UK citizenship before committing the offence which now raises a question mark over their status here, and perhaps in some cases did not do so because to do so would have meant relinquishing a citizenship of birth or a citizenship of descent (not because becoming British required them to do so, but because they couldn’t hang on to their original citizenship if they also became British). In addition, there may be those whose status in the UK is itself based upon humanitarian principles, applied either to themselves or other members of their family.

I should add at this point that I am not the first blogger to point this out. The Curious Hamster, like me a Sharpener newbie, has pointed out the perils of what he elegantly and ironically calls a policy of ‘hug a foreign prisoner‘ which self-evidently does not accord with current political attitudes amongst the wider UK population. But in my view, ongoing developments make it all the more urgent that we should speak out to insist on the problematic nature of the foreign/non-foreign distinction, wherever it is applied and especially in the context of prisoners.

I don’t want to labour the point, but cases such as that of Ernesto Leal, about whom I previously blogged on Bondbloke, make me very angry. It seems to me that in order to make themselves appear tough in these circumstances, politicians are letting loose the dogs on people who, in other circumstances, would be very unlikely to be subject to deportation orders on conclusion of their sentences because of their profound (in that case 30 year) connection with the UK. In other words, having served their debts to society, such persons should be allowed to get on with their own imperfect lives like the rest of us, having – one hopes – learnt a painful lesson. It is pathetic if, instead of concentrating on the people who really have gone missing on release from prison, the focus turns upon those who do not conceal their whereabouts, or those who are now reaching the point of consideration for release and/or deportation and who end up remaining in prison or being deported, because they are easy targets of a ‘get tough’ policy. As announced by both Clarke and Blair on Wednesday, we are to be offered a ‘prisoner deportation pledge’, which seems to involve trying to send prisoners back to serve their sentences in their state of nationality (regardless of the circumstances?) and trying to make binding decisions as early on as possible during a sentence about deportation, regardless of any subsequently changing circumstances. Alternatively, are we to see convicted foreign criminals to be sent home to serve their sentence in home jails regardless of the condition of those jails (and whether that condition might infringe the ECHR) and regardless of the whether such convictions might have been involved a miscarriage of justice which they are thereby prevented from contesting? Perhaps it’s just another limb of the restrictive policy which saw Charles Clarke seeking to save £5m a couple of weeks ago by restricting the rights to compensation for those who have been wrongfully convicted.

But as important as the xenophobic politics we are seeing arrayed in front of us at the present time are the general issues which arise from the question of ‘what matters?’. The colour of the passport? The nature of the stamp (or lack of a stamp) within the passport? The place of residence? The familial and other relations of a person? Are foreigners who commit crimes in the UK intrinsically more ‘evil’ than UK citizens? Or are they merely more easily the target of characterization as evil and as ‘not our concern’, because they are different – on grounds of nationality – from UK citizens? If so, this approach beggars belief, in the sense that this otherness is essentially the construct of a system of nation states itself of relatively recent vintage, and not part of some sort of ‘natural order’ of things. After all, England venerates a patron saint who is not English at all. Many states have myths of foundation which celebrate the role of the outsider, who appears to solve problems of national identity and democratic representation in a way that an insider cannot. But while such arguments can easily be confined to the realm of the political theory, it is less easy to ignore arguments about the often blurred boundaries between the insider and the outsider which result from patterns of migration, whether forced or voluntary. If so, some of today’s politicians, themselves the products of relatively recent migrations, appear to forget the blurring of notions of belonging and identity, not to mention legal patterns of affiliation, which often result from transnational lives. 

For me the political problem is that lumping together ‘foreign prisoners’ appears to be yet another reaction to the elephant in the corner, the exclusionary and racist politics of parties such as the BNP which appeal to senses of insecurity in communities which struggle to make sense of changed circumstances. Or maybe it is just another manifestation of the willingness to see rule by reference to the lowest common denominator of tabloid journalism. This type of reaction presents yet another get out of jail card to politicians of lazy inclination who think that all it takes to get themselves out of a corner of their own making is another get-tough policy which targets a group whose marginality to political voice with current society makes them electorally irrelevant. Except, that is, as the scapegoats who offer the promise of a few more votes in this week’s local elections and the possibility (ever receding) of achieving fourth term of office in two or three years time for a morally bankrupt government.