MAKING POVERTY A CRIME

You don't have to be a danger to society to be sent to prison, says Ian
Bruce. Failing to make ends meet can put you there as well

JANET committed a crime apparently so serious and threatening to society
that the court had little option but to send her to Cornton Vale, Scotland's
notorious and suicide-plagued women's prison. The cause? A bald tyre. The
sentence? Seven days. The 33-year-old Glaswegian, a first-time offender owed
the State UKP46, a debt that was to cost her a week of her life, her
livelihood and her self-respect.

In 1995, Janet had been working as a private-hire taxi driver when she was
involved in a minor collision with another vehicle. Although cleared of any
blame for the accident, routine police checks revealed that one of her tyres
was worn, for which she was handed a UKP40 fine and three penalty points on
her licence.

She should have paid the financial penalty, but she didn't. As the legal
process rolled on, she was given the opportunity to pay the fine off in
instalments of UKP5. She defaulted on those payments as well.

Janet admits she was stupid, but is still devastated by the way the full
force of the law was unleashed upon her. One day the police arrived at her
house to serve a warrant for her arrest for non-payment.

Despite the minor nature of her offence (and, ironically the fact that at
the moment of her apprehension she had more than enough to cover the
outstanding sum in her pocket), Janet spent the weekend that followed in
police custody. Whenever she left her cell, she did so under escort,
shackled with a pair of heavy, chafing handcuffs. After sentencing, the
by-now terrified woman was driven to Cornton Vale in a bus full of other
freshly sentenced women, many of them beginning longer-term periods of
incarceration for serious offences.

The usual admissions procedure followed. A process in which the bewildered
woman was roughly stripped, searched and showered before being thrown in
with the rest of the prison population. She claims that at this point, she
was immediately surrounded by hardened inmates looking for drugs, money or
anything else of value they could get. As the realisation broke that she was
alone in an alien environment with nobody she could turn to, Janet cried
herself to sleep.

Joanne O'Reilly and Yvonne Gilmour, women who were to become famous as the
third and sixth inmates of the women's prison to commit suicide in the last
two years, were in the jail at the time. "I knew them and I had an idea of
what they were going through," says Janet. "There were girls in there who
had only been around for a matter of weeks before they had been bullied into
becoming somebody's gay lover. It was more or less rape. I can only thank
God that the experience didn't affect me like it did them because it so
easily could have. The very thought of it makes my blood run cold. It's
something I don't think I could ever forget."

When you meet Janet, a shy, respectable little woman with about as much
hardness and guile in her as Squirrel Nutkin, it is scarcely believable that
a court could have condemned her to a prison sentence over a sum less than
the price of a week's groceries. However, hers is not an unusual case.
According to the latest Scottish Office figures, each year around 9,000
Scots are sent to prison for non-payment of fines. On average, they will
serve an 11-day sentence because they owe the system UKP256. Almost 500 will
begin their jail terms owing less than UKP50, over half are young people
aged less than 30 and, unbelievably, 52 per cent of the entire female prison
population are there because they failed to pay minor court fines.

While accepting that there must always be a reasonable punishment available
to reprimand those who break the law. many members of the legal
establishment argue that hundreds of Scots will go to prison this year
because they are simply too poor to pay the fines levied upon them. Gerry
Brown, former chairman of the Scottish Law Society's Criminal Law Committee,
is deeply concerned by a trend which seems to be making poverty a crime: "It
must be recognised that fines are often imposed without any reference to the
accused's finances or their ability to pay. Thousands of people are being
criminalised for petty, victimless offences."

Certainly, there seems to be a litany of cases where Scotland's poor are
being punished heavily for their position at the bottom of the economic
heap. Angela, a 28-year-old Edinburgh woman, was living on benefits in 1997
and felt unable to pay her television licence. A fine of UKP300 was imposed
which, naturally enough, she couldn't afford to pay either. A seven-day
sentence followed. Similarly, Anne, 31, a mother of two from Glasgow, was
caught shoplifting toiletries for her family in the same year. Living on
benefits and unable to pay for her own sanitary towels, it came as no
surprise when she subsequently failed to pay the UKP200 penalty levied, and
her husband was forced to quit his low-paid job to look after their children
when she spent ten days in Cornton Vale. The couple remain unemployed and in
debt to this day.

On average, the cost to the prison system of jailing fine defaulters amounts
to UKP800 for each one. In special circumstances it can cost even more:
Gerry, a 40-year-old haemophiliac from Paisley, failed to pay a UKP150 fine
for breach of the peace. Due to his medical condition, the recovering
alcoholic had to be taken to hospital under police escort on each of his
five days of imprisonment - the enormous cost of which was met by the
taxpayer.

In response to growing concerns over an increasingly inappropriate
situation, Scottish Office Prisons Minister Henry McLeish last year
announced a wide-ranging review of the alternative options to imprisonment
for such petty offenders, the result of which was a consultation document on
community sentencing published last week. Chief among the solutions put
forward is the Supervised Attendance Order (SAO), a sentencing currently
being phased in that affords courts the opportunity to impose a compulsory
period of up to 100 hours in a community education, training or work
programme for individuals defaulting on a fine of less than UKP500.
Currently only available as a punishment for those who have already failed
to pay fines, the document suggests SAOs could be expanded to allow courts
to dispense such orders as a first instance sentence, a move which could
take account of those unable to pay any kind of fiscal penalty.

Keith Simpson, senior manager at the ex-prisoners' association SACRO,
broadly welcomes the Scottish Office moves to remove from the prison system
the large numbers of offenders he believes provide no threat to society:
"Incarcerating fine-defaulters does nothing to protect the public and only
makes it more likely that they will re- offend."

That would certainly tally with Janet's experience. Her prison record has
severely complicated regaining her taxi driver's permit and, she fears,
scuppered her chances of finding other employment: "I panic whenever an
application form or an interviewer asks me about my criminal record. My
offence may have been a silly little thing, but I've still been there -I'm
still an ex-con."

She would also agree that the chances of a petty offender getting into
serious crime are greatly increased following a prison sentence. Despite
serving only seven days - during which she says she kept a very low
profile - Janet claims that she could not avoid gaining an eavesdropped
education in drug dealing, prostitution, fraud and theft.

While Janet and the campaigners who fight causes such as hers welcome Henry
McLeish's latest initiative, they point out that, so far, this is only a
consultation document, and any results are unlikely to become concrete until
the turn of the century. Until then, it seems likely that another 18,000
Scots will have been sent to prison, at a cost of in excess of UKP15
million, for a combination of petty offences and poverty. It is an
experience, says Janet, that will leave them like it has her; unemployed,
branded, as she sees it, a common criminal, and facing a long struggle to
get their lives back on track.

"It's all been downhill from prison. It's the top of a slippery slope that
you can't seem to get back up," says Janet. "Some days I keep on hoping that
things will get better. Others I wake up and feel like hanging myself -
there doesn't seem to be any point to it all."

Checked-by: Don Beck