24.10.2013
Film: Crime, youth and punishment
Jim Moody reviews works from the London Film Festival with a linked theme
Questions around criminal justice are highlighted by the feature film Starred up, which was shown in this month’s London Film Festival.1 Its director, David Mackenzie, explores an adult jail from a new perspective, centring on late teenage offender Eric (Jack O’Connell), who has just been transferred - ‘starred up’ - for unspecified transgressions in one of her majesty’s young offender institutions (HMYOI). As the HMYOI portion of the UK prison estate is specifically designed to incarcerate young offenders from 18 to 21 or 22, Eric’s transfer to adult prison is unusual, to say the least.
Brutality in prison dramas is nothing new. But each time it is depicted it should raise fundamental questions or risk being seen as mere exploitation. Thankfully, Starred up is unafraid to confront the expressions of brutality of both prisoners and staff, including senior officials. While the visceral moments in the film skilfully skirt the lurid, its dramatic thrust leads one to question the current prison regime. The prison mix includes social worker Oliver (Rupert Friend), as well as Eric’s long-term prisoner father, Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), and governor Hayes (Sam Spruell).
Clearly some prison officers and governors abuse their power - there are too many documented cases for that to be dismissed. After all, deaths in custody continue to occur everywhere in the criminal justice system: in secure training centres, HMYOIs, adult prisons and police cells. Numbers of deaths in prison have shown an increase in the last 10 years, though those in police custody have diminished markedly.
Inquest, the campaign against deaths in custody, “believes that deaths in prison cannot be looked at separately from examining harsh and impoverished prison conditions, the use of segregation, poor medical care and prison overcrowding - all of which have implications for people’s mental and physical health. Until there is a fundamental review of the overuse of prison for the most vulnerable and marginalised, prison deaths will continue.”2 The organisation quotes figures that show over half of prison deaths are self-inflicted (the rest are apparently due to ‘natural causes’), though the usual fog of ministry of justice secrecy conveniently disguises how many, if any, of these might have been cases of ‘assisted suicide’. Starred up has no such qualms.
Despite Eric’s swagger and dangerous bent, he nonetheless comes over as a vulnerable young man. His anger and that of other, older offenders can to a degree be tackled with professional assistance, but it takes a bold and brave soul to do so. Yet Oliver appears to be just such a one, though the pressures of powerful superiors might be formidable. Whether such dedication and persistence exists throughout the prison estate is moot, assuming there is even the opportunity to exercise it.
At root, there is a need to question whether or not imprisonment has any lasting or effective use when dealing with those who have committed crimes, whether of violence or not. Indeed, what then is the purpose of imprisonment? In essence, many mainstream apologias, even when not reduced to the level of the Daily Mail, hark back to the idea that a guilty person must expect to face a form of social death.
Overwhelmingly, crime under capitalism derives from how society functions - theft of social wealth through the profit system and the extreme violence of war. What example is it when the biggest, bourgeois criminals-at-large escape scot-free?
Migrant repression
Another sphere of subjugation of human beings to the needs of the bourgeoisie is manifest in the control of migrants and this was highlighted at the London Film Festival in the feature Leave to remain, directed by former documentary filmmaker Bruce Goodison. Using real teenage asylum-seekers alongside professional actors, including the excellent Toby Jones, who plays youth worker Nigel, Leave to remain looks at the lives of a group of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, focusing in more detail on three of them - Omar (Noof Ousellam), Zizidi (Yasmin Mwanza) and Abdul (Masieh Zarrien). This is far removed from the highly politicised ‘reality’ of trash TV programmes exemplified by UK Border Force 2 (to be found on Sky’s Pick channel).
While immigration laws exist to exert social control over documented workers, it is also true that undocumented (so-called ‘illegal’) workers face super-exploitation: some capitalists have thus been enabled to steal the product of these workers’ labour at discount over the paltry minimum wage. And a useful side-effect has been created for the mass media and establishment politicians who hope to divide workers, indigenous and migrant, with the big lie that incomers are the problem, not capital.
Goodison’s film deals with one specific feature of the UK migration mill: young people who arrive unaccompanied by an adult, and what happens to them as they approach 18 and the possibility of being sent back to whatever country they have fled. Some of the horror that forces parents to send their children away from danger inevitably seeps into the film’s presentation. But, as is usual in the limited public discourse over asylum in particular, attention zeroes in on questions of ‘genuineness’. For example, Abdul is made to endure an immigration officer’s questions about whether or not he has pubic and chest hair as a test of his juvenile status, with the official looking for anything that will help him deny Abdul admission to the country. Inevitably, wider questioning of restrictions on those wanting to enter the UK require another forum beyond this film’s remit.
Dealing quite rightly with the pains and indignities of those claiming asylum as the film does serves in an oblique way to highlight how migration matters have become so narrowly focused in recent decades. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, resorts to ritual, knee-jerk accusations of ‘racism’ against the state. The basic working class principle of free movement hardly gets a hearing these days and this must change if the bourgeois consensus is to be exposed.
Copenhagen’s sink
Life is not easy in Copenhagen’s Northwest district, especially if you are 18 and have the burden of the senior male role in the family. In Northwest (director: Michael Noer), which also appeared at the LFF, Casper (Gustav Dyekjær Giese) has shouldered this load in his own way. He is a bespoke burglar, taking what he can from others’ homes to his local gang leader, Jamal (Dulfi Al-Jabouri), for minimal payment. Casper’s younger brother, Andy (Oscar Dyekjær Giese), joins him in these ventures when he decides to try another fence, which appears to offer career advancement, to Jamal’s intense displeasure.
Young people caught in dire social circumstances sometimes make choices whose ramifications may be much riskier than they realise. And so it proves with Casper and Andy, who fall foul of both the neighbourhood gang and their new best friends. Noer gives us an unvarnished but fully dimensioned view of Casper, caught as he is between his desire to do the best for his mother and young sister and how to get the wherewithal to keep them all from poverty. He is understandably seduced by the ease with which his new work brings satisfactory rewards.
Liberal tut-tutting at some of the choices that are made in order to survive against the odds under the foulness of capitalism has no purchase. Crime under this social system is the fruit of that cankerous tree. The interplay of characters in Northwest - criminals as most of them are - appeals thanks to their truthful portrayal as human beings. We thus accept them as individuals, caught in whatever cleft their narrowly defined lives have placed them. Life’s options are definitely not the same for everyone.
Director Noer, formerly a documentary filmmaker, did not use a detailed script and left the actors to improvise much of the dialogue and action in a neighbourhood where there was local cooperation: this shows in the freshness and veracity of the exchanges. Through this approach we may feel empathy with and some sympathy for the characters. Society’s waste of youth and the impossibility of achieving anywhere near a full human potential is well pointed up in this enlivening example of the crime genre.
Notes
1. At the time of writing none of the three films reviewed here has been given a UK release date.
2. http://inquest.gn.apc.org/website/policy/deaths-in-custody/deaths-in-prison.