Advertising’s false picture

An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an ‘imbalanced power dynamic’. The poster showed a white prison guard (or ‘screw’ as I believe they are known) and a black prisoner. The ASA concluded that the advert was ‘likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race, by reinforcing negative stereotypes about black men’. It would have been OK if the prisoner had been white. I am not sure what the views of the ASA would have been if both men had been black. The fact that both of the people in the ad were men also negatively reinforces a stereotype – that men tend to commit the most crime. This is the problem: men do commit the most crime, overwhelmingly so, but there is no political desire to hide that fact.

Of course, black men commit only a small minority of crime in the UK and are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime (almost half of Londoners stabbed to death are black).