PRI is a proud member of the Campaign to Decriminalise Poverty and Status. The campaign works at the national, regional and international level to challenge petty offences that impact the most marginalised people in our society and drive imprisonment and overcrowding levels unnecessarily.
In many countries around the world, criminal justice responses disproportionately affect people who are poor or homeless, migrants, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, informal traders, people who use drugs, and racial and ethnic minorities. This effectively creates a two-tiered justice system with offences like touting, loitering, begging, having unpaid debts, and being labelled as things like a ‘rogue or vagabond’ being used to arrest and imprison marginalised populations – often for lengthy periods of time while they wait for their trial and sentence.
These laws, policies and practices criminalise people for who they are, rather than what they have done, with little connection to public safety. There is no evidence from research that arresting people for these types of offences makes society safer or reduces crime. In fact, research rather indicates the contrary – such offences expose already vulnerable people to further marginalisation and exclusion.
Detention not only adds to prison overcrowding, but also has a range of negative consequences for individuals, their families and communities:
- Loss of income and loss of employment for those employed in the formal sector.
- Families lose their contribution (monetary and non-monetary) to the household, even if it was small.
- Family relationships, especially with children, and community ties are negatively impacted.
- Children can suffer in terms of their general care, as well as access to education.
- Children often drop out of school because the family cannot afford costs associated with schooling and children may need to work or undertake caring responsibilities of the detained parent.
- Lengthy pre-trial detention brings new costs to families such as travel costs to visit family members in prison, and the cost of providing food and other essential necessities to their family members in prison (which the state is obliged, but often fails, to provide). Ultimately these impacts result in people living in poverty subsidising the costs of imprisonment.
- Severe health consequences, especially in overcrowded prisons with poor health care services.
- Many people face multiple, intersectional forms of discrimination in prisons and criminal justice systems, including combinations of gender, disability, race, ethnicity, nationality, and class.
- Stigma and marginalisation associated with imprisonment can make it more difficult to find empoyment on release from detention.