spectives. This necessarily includes people who don't consider themselves Marxists.
This is still a favourable time for the development of a class struggle party to Labour's left. Most militant working class despise new Labour. It has no power of attraction for radical youth, opponents of the war or environmentalists. Its own members are leaving in disgust.
The BNP's success in Dagenham shows what may happen if such a party does not emerge.
None of the surviving fragments of the Socialist Alliance are in a position to be the alternative. The 'Campaign For New Workers' Party' doesn't even try to pretend that it is anything but a wholly owned subsidiary of the Socialist Party.
Only Respect has the national profile and the proven record of electoral success to be the nucleus of a new party.
Yet the hard fact is that for all but a handful of members Respect is not seen as this alternative. This need not be the case. In several parts of the country supporters of Socialist Resistance continue working actively inside Respect for our vision of a pluralist, democratic, socialist party.
The missing ingredients are the large numbers of politically aware and politically experienced militants who know how to organise and how to fight combined with the younger radicalising forces drawn into politics by the war, the environment, campaigning and industrial struggle.
Unless Respect can make itself attractive to them, the 2007 conference will be even more narrow than 2006's. Chris Eades, Having spent almost a decade in the Deep South, USA, mostly defending prisoners on Death Row and children sentenced for serious crimes, it had always been apparent to me that the criminal justice system there was a weapon to be used very nearly exclusively against the poor and the powerless. Prison, in particular, reflected, perpetuated and exacerbated the racial, social and economic problems that afflicted many communities in which I worked.
My clients were all very poor, many were functionally illiterate and many suffered from severe mental health problems. In pursuing a lawsuit against the State of Mississippi, the office for which I worked tested the condemned men awaiting execution and found that around 40 percent could not read or write and over half suffered from two or more recognisable psychological illnesses.
None could afford a lawyer, few were employed prior to arrest and two thirds were regular users of illegal drugs. Little wonder, it seems, that they ended up where they did. I can't say I would be any different had 1 lived their lives.
Forty-seven million Americans have a criminal record. Thirteen million - six per cent of the adult population - have been convicted one million a year.
America has witnessed a fivefold increase in its inmate population since the early 1970s, and now over two million live behind bars. More than three-quarters of a million black men are incarcerated and nearly 2 million are under the supervision of the courts in some manner.
For black males aged twentyfive to thirty-four, one in every eight is in prison on any given day and they are six times more likely than whites to be there. More than two thirds of the fast growing female prison population are women of colour.
In Louisiana, where I lived, the State incarcerates children and adults at a greater rate than any other. The State Penitentiary (Angola' because the slaves that worked the plantation had been stolen from that country houses over 5,000 men, two thousand of whom are likely to die there and be deposited in the penitentiary's own graveyard. England and Wales have more life-sentenced prisoners than the rest of Western Europe combined, and sentence lengths continue to grow
My constant consolation was the belief that the United Kingdom was somehow less driven to use the criminal justice system and prison to deal with those people manifesting the problems caused by poverty and inequality; a view of which I have now been disabused.
Over 80,000 prisoners languish in our overcrowded gaols; almost double the 1993 incarcerated population, and this despite the fact that the numbers found guilty by the courts nas remained largely constant.
We incarcerate humans at a greater rate than any other nation in Western Europe, depositing the human refuse into the most privatised prison system in Europe. The system, practices.
We are addicted to prison, and incarceration has become less a reflection of criminality than of our society's inability or unwillingness to deal with the social problems largely of its own making.
The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, recently described prisons as 'social dustbins', warehousing people with problems at a cost of over £42,000 a year. He was not wrong. Within the prison population there exists an awful concentration of the symptoms of inequality and poverty.
Most prisoners are not convicted of crimes of violence, half of all prisoners under 25 have been in care and many suffer severe mental health and substance abuse problems.
In all, 20 percent of men and almost 40 per cent of women entering custody say they have previously attempted suicide. 72 percent of male and 70 per cent of female sentenced prisoners suffer from two or more mental health disorders and 20 percent of prisoners have four of the five major mental health disorders.
Over half of the female prison used drugs prior to imprisonment.
In terms of housing, education and employment too, the prison population is severely blighted. Fourteen per cent of men, 20 per cent of women and ten percent of young offenders were not in permanent accommodation before custody and 30 per cent of those released from prison will have no where to live.
More than half of all prisoners are at or below the level expected of an 11 year old in reading, two-thirds in numeracy and four fifths in writing. More than half of male and more than two thirds of female adult prisoners have no qualifications at all. Half of all prisoners do not have the skills required by 96 percent of jobs and only one in five are able to complete a job application form. Nearly half of male sentenced prisoners were excluded from school.
Our use of prison also gives voice to the racism of our society. One in four of the prison population is from a minority ethnic group. This compares to one in eleven of the general population. In 2002 there were more African Caribbean entrants to prison (over 11,500) than there were to UK universities (around 8,000).
Prison here has become a social quarantine and mirrors in intent, though not in scale, the US model and it must be expected to have similar consequences in terms of human suffering and the harm caused to society at large.
We no longer have a right to feel superior to our American cousins as long as the most accurate determinant of who is in prison is the level of deprivation they have suffered. Chris Eades is a Barrister-at-Law and Attorney-at-Law, and Policy Officer, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, King's College London.