Social harms, crime and criminal justice

This chapter focuses upon relationships between social assistance and crime in the UK. It examines ways the operation of social assistance and its consequences create social harms for the income poorest people, which can be understood as sources of crime, exacerbated by the operation of a criminal justice system geared to punishing individuals that in various ways make them poorer. The chapter argues that future research on the intersection between crime and social assistance should focus upon the ways in which states exacerbate social harm by ignoring its socio-economic embeddedness, and at how such issues as poverty and destitution might be taken into account in criminal justice processes; why in social assistance policy making there is an indifference, even an enthusiasm, for the infliction of such harm, and on understanding the complexities and nuances of how income poor people experience social harm and criminal justice. Such research, the chapter contends, will also need to be embedded in recent and more long-standing socio-political concerns that have framed social assistance policy, including policy reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic and devolved social assistance responsibility across the nations of the UK