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). But the statistics put the black population of the UK at about 3.5 per cent, while the percentage of prisoners in English and Welsh jails who are black is just over 12 per cent. I’m sure this is solely the consequence of the institutional and structural racism we have in this country: some black people, driven to despair by the iniquities of life sometimes, understandably enough, resort to shooting or stabbing other black people. Perhaps one way out of this advertising conundrum is to show a black prisoner but to make it clear he is doing a three-year stretch for embezzlement, a white-collar and largely white crime. That would challenge the stereotype. You thought he was in for a spot of stabbing? Racist!
Stereotypes are very useful things.
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