weekend, a senior police commander gave the order to ‘take back the streets’. The next thirty-six hours saw a thousand people – from peaceful protesters to journalists, human rights observers and Toronto residents – arrested and detained, a stark illustration of police priorities.98 Two years later, another instructive example took place in Canada, this time in Quebec. Thousands of students were engaged in protests against the hike in their tuition fees. ‘The Maple Spring’, as it was dubbed, was met by a concerted clampdown by police, legislators and the courts. Law enforcers used pepper spray, stun grenades and rubber bullets. These draconian measures resulted in new anti-protest laws being passed and over 3,000 arrests in the space of seven months. One of these, a student leader named Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, was convicted and sentenced for the grave crime of declaring, in a media interview, that he believed student picket lines were a legitimate form of protest.99
In the US, the Occupy movement, although a peaceful expression of widely held concerns, resulted in numerous instances of police brutality, human rights violations and mass arrests. And in Puerto Rico, peaceful protests over the last few years have been met with, among other things, toxic chemicals, tear gas, pepper spray, swinging batons, rubber bullets, sting-ball grenades and ‘conducted-energy’ weapons.100 These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Along with the erosion of personal privacy, the criminalisation of whistleblowers, and the broader clampdown on internet freedoms, they appear to be part of a wider trend that threatens our most treasured democratic institutions.
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The criminal justice system places the cordon of responsibility tightly around the individual. This is a disingenuous way to absolve political and economic systems and to deny the need for real equality beyond the confines of the courtroom. If we judge a person or group to be truly responsible for some deplorable action, we leave no room for a more searching explanation of the deeper causes of that action – and this myopia increases the likelihood of reproducing the confluence of economic, political and cultural forces that created the conditions for it to occur. (In the same way, if we judge a person to be ultimately responsible for an admirable action, our presumed knowledge can blind us to its deeper causes, making it harder to reproduce the kinds of behaviour we want to see.)
The responsibility myth has a powerful hold over us: even if we reject it intellectually, it can appear inescapable in practice, in our day-to-day lives. Yet, as we have seen, it gives us a distorted picture of reality. If we accept that people are not truly responsible for what they do, then a prisoner is no more deserving of his sentence than the judge who delivers it to him. The unsavoury truth, as jurist Wendell Holmes understood, is that the law ‘bears most hardly on those least prepared for it’.101
Today’s system of criminal punishment is not a solution to injustice but a symptom of it. Its irrational foundations divert attention away from society’s deeper injustices and failings, many of which we will explore in the following chapters. If society was serious about reducing crime it would hold accountable, and attempt to deter, those whose actions and ideologies perpetuate the conditions that breed it: those who fight to preserve and extend enormous inequalities of wealth, power and opportunity. A politician in a suit can do far more harm than any street gang, drug dealer or petty thief.
Crime is a politically determined category that must always be scrutinised. For too long our system of punishment has been the means of reinforcing broader social injustice rather than preventing it. The antidote, at all levels of society, is greater political accountability and equality. Only through the creation of a fairer, more humane society – one that offers dignified opportunities to all – can a criminal justice system ever be truly just.
3
Reward
Every morning, people around the world wake up to another day’s work. Across the planet minerals are extracted, machinery operated, goods transported, seeds sown, text typed, houses built, crops farmed, clothes stitched, patients cared for, and children taught. Hours pass and energy is expended. It’s a remarkable fact that at the close of each day people are rewarded so unevenly for their contributions. Billions earn less than $2 a day while, at the opposite end of the spectrum, an American hedge-fund manager like David Tepper bags more than $1 million an hour.1 The result is that the eighty-five richest people on Earth own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population, and the richest 1 per cent now own more than the remaining 99 per cent combined.2
Disparities in wealth are so pervasive that it takes some effort of imagination to see things afresh, to understand that there is nothing inevitable about poverty or gross inequality in the modern world. There is no immutable law of nature preventing us from sharing things more equitably, so that everyone is fed, clothed, nourished, sheltered and educated. Human choices maintain the current distribution of wealth and human choices can change it.
In pre-capitalist societies, large inequalities in wealth and power were often justified by religious teachings, which claimed that the social and economic hierarchy was ordained by God, so that those with great wealth had a divine right to it. Today’s dominant justification for inequality comes not from religion but economics. Ethical considerations play little or no part in the practice and study of modern economics – you will not find a serious discussion of fairness in any standard textbook. The irony of this is striking given that the study of economics evolved as an offshoot of ethics.3 The father of Western economic thought, Adam Smith, was, after all, a moral philosopher.
The familiar justification for inequality is founded on the principle that people should be rewarded according to the value of their contribution. There is something intuitively compelling about this reasoning: you get what you give. Mainstream (neoclassical) economists tell us that this is precisely what happens in a competitive, free market. The impartial laws of the market determine the value of your contribution and reward you accordingly. If the free market rewards some people hundreds of times more than others, it can only mean the former produce hundreds of times more value than the latter. A worker who adds £50,000 of value to a company is rewarded with £50,000 in wages, so the theory goes. As we will see, this is not actually how people are rewarded but, even if it were, would it be fair?
There are different ways to contribute to the production or provision of something. Suppose we decide to bake a cake: I pay for the ingredients and let you use my kitchen, but you do all the baking. The outcome is a delicious cake but each of us has contributed something quite different. You have put in your time and skills as a chef; I’ve contributed my money and property. In a market economy, both contributions can generate an income. Some people are rewarded for what they do; others for what they own.
If something we own can be traded in a market, generating an income, economists call it ‘capital’.4 Capital includes land, real estate, industrial equipment and money. The income derived from it can take a number of forms, such as profit, rent, dividends, interest or royalties. But there are glaring problems with the principle of rewarding people according to the capital they own. Most obviously, it allows some people to grow extraordinarily rich without having to do anything at all. After all, wealth generates wealth. Between 1990 and 2010, Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress of L’Oréal, the world’s largest cosmetics company, increased her fortune from $2 billion to $25 billion without having to lift a finger (more than ever, investment decisions are made by paid experts).5
Our economic system delivers vast rewards to the rich not for what they do, but for what they own. What’s more, the greater the fortune, the faster it tends to grow. The largest fortunes can achieve rates of return two or three times larger than those earned by smaller ones (6 or 7 per cent compared with 2 or 3 per cent).6 Mainstream economists have long assumed that a natural outcome of the market is a reduction in wealth inequality, which ultimately stabilises at an acceptable level, but in reality this depends on the institutions and policies in place. Historical evidence suggests that
