The New York Times has just run a shaming investigation into the UK legal principle of “joint enterprise”, under which people can be charged for crimes they were nowhere near.
The report was humiliating for so many reasons, particularly if you think of the US as the world leader in locking people up for no reason except racism. Black men in the UK are three times more likely to be prosecuted as groups of four or more – the principal measure of a joint enterprise case – than white men. The energy to protest against it was stifled six years ago, when the supreme court ruled that joint enterprise cases were unfair and racially biased – yet nothing changed.
As the NYT puts it: “Rather than be constrained by the ruling, senior prosecutors have quietly devised strategies to keep bringing joint enterprise cases and winning convictions.”
An untold part of the story is what this does to prisons. I was on the board of a prison charity, the Butler Trust, until this year, but I steered off the subject, as it’s a very establishment organisation with Princess Anne as patron, so it was more or less impossible to write about jails without sounding a shade too anarchic. The right amount of anarchy for royally endorsed charities is none.
Yet there was one thing that everyone agreed about, from the most conservative prison governor to the most radical forensic psychologist: prison environments survive on the assumption that everyone inside is guilty. Everything from internal discipline to behaviour management to skills, training, rehabilitation and psychological programmes, everything relies on this foundation, that prisoners have ended up there justly. How do you deal with a prisoner who is serving time for a crime he was nowhere near?
Sure, you could put him on an anger-management course, but it would have to be bespoke: “How to manage your anger when it’s the totally legitimate response to an unjust process”. The effect, even on people who are in prison fair and square, is corrosive. It shouldn’t take international glare to put this back on the agenda, but it would be great if the NYT’s piece did.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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