British public opinion includes contrasting views as to what life behind bars is like and what it should be like. In the former vision, inmates lounge around centrally heated cells in their pyjamas, watching television and playing cards, treating prison like a low-budget hotel. In the latter, convicts sew mailbags or even break rocks, each stitch or blow a punishing reminder of the futility of crime. The truth is that since Parliament abolished penal servitude and hard labour in English jails in 1948, the prison system has found it increasingly hard to construct an affordable regime that discourages idleness and prepares convicts for a time when they will be expected to walk the straight and narrow beyond the jail walls.
The coalition government believes in the redemptive and healing power of work. It forms the centrepiece of their welfare reforms and is also a key plank of their criminal justice reforms. For two years running, the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has addressed the Conservative party conference with promises to banish sluggishness and boredom from the nation’s jails and instil a regime of “honest labour”.
Mr Clarke’s plans for most prisoners in England and Wales to work a 40-hour week have been welcomed by both traditionalists and reformers but, as ever, it is in the detail that the devil can be found.
A lack of opportunity
While prison rules require inmates to engage in ‘useful work’ and privileges can be used to encourage compliance, no prisoner is compelled to work and most do not. With just 24,000 work places in a prison estate holding more than 85,000 inmates, the problem has less to do with indolence and more to do with lack of opportunity.
Since the mid-nineties, the prison population has increased by 70% but the number of inmates busy in prison workshops has risen by just 7%. The system has been criticised for simply warehousing those sentenced to periods of incarceration by the courts. The last prison mailbag was sewn more than 30 years ago.
Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform has argued that “for too long prisoners have been written off, demeaned and patronised as being illiterate and idle.” The Conservative think-tank Policy Exchange agrees, bemoaning a system in which “offenders are nudged towards a default where work is unrewarding and rare, and idleness is the norm”.
The priority, therefore, must be to expand the availability of prison work places. However, with budgets being cut and the existing estate at risk of bursting at the seams, there is no easy way to create the workshops needed. Prison governors have argued that physically adapting many of the older prisons to accommodate more work will cost money they haven’t got. Prison officers have warned that moving and monitoring inmates to and from work requires extra staff, again costing money they haven’t got. Employment outside prison may be an option for low-risk inmates but someone still has to pick up the tab for travel and security.
The role of private companies
The Ministry of Justice is hoping that private companies can be persuaded to create and fund 11,000 new jobs within the prison estate. Ministers point to a metal workshop in a private jail in Fazakerley on Merseyside as a model of what can be done. In an area of high unemployment, however, the scheme raises another broader issue – that prisoners will be used to undercut the labour market and deprive law-abiding people of employment. Kenneth Clarke has said he is “ultra-sensitive” to the risk of hostile headlines suggesting that newly redundant factory workers have had their jobs stolen by convicted criminals.
Currently, prisoners who do work get an average of just £8 a week, normally paid ‘cash in hand’ to be spent on perks in the prison. The Ministry of Justice has said it intends to enact the dormant 1996 Prisoners’ Earnings Act, allowing inmates to be paid the minimum wage, thus ensuring they aren’t exploited as a source of cheap labour. Some of the inmates’ earnings would go to victim support charities as well as contributing to their upkeep in prison, supporting families on the outside and saving for resettlement.
The conundrum that flows from that, of course, is that if prisons don’t offer cheap labour, why would private companies want to fund workshops and create jobs inside them? There is broad agreement that preparing prisoners for the world of work is a good idea, but expanding provision at a time of budget cuts and soaring unemployment is proving difficult.
The Serco perspective on working in prisons, by Elaine Bailey, Managing Director, Secure Accommodation and Community Services
It is widely acknowledged that the carrying out of meaningful, productive work by prisoners, allied to education and the acquisition of new skills, assists offenders on their release to secure employment and re-integrate into society, thereby reducing the risk of reoffending and cutting the costs of crime.
Serco believes that in order to properly rehabilitate prisoners, their time in custody should be characterised by a balanced regime, one which requires prisoners to undertake hard work, but also makes time for them to address the often very complex causes of their offending behaviour through a combination of education and offender behaviour programmes (OBPs). It is important, therefore, that with a limited core day, the move to working prisons leaves sufficient time for these interventions to be delivered. Industrial activity alone will not address the causes of offending behavior. It is not a panacea.
Every day in prisons operated by Serco, over 3,000 prisoners participate in a range of activities across the core day. At any one time, 1,000 full-time equivalent prisoners are engaged in commercial activity in purpose-built workshops fulfilling contracts won in open market competition. For example, at Dovegate a contract for the assembly of lighting components has been secured. In order to fulfill and prolong these contracts it is crucial that prisoners have the requisite skills, work productively, maintain quality and hence operate profitably.
Commercial activities are managed and prisoners are incentivised and rewarded to achieve targets. At Dovegate and Lowdham Grange prisons, Serco delivers an activity programme that provides 29 hours of purposeful activity for every prisoner. The prisons have been designed to provide sufficient, appropriately located, sized and equipped areas in which activity programmes can be delivered, through work and education.
The core day is scheduled tightly to minimise ‘idle’ unproductive time, while the provision of in-cell facilities such as showers, telephones and intranet enables prisoners to undertake social and learning activities in their own time. The core day is also mapped so that it closely matches a normal working day in the community.
The purposeful activities offered at both prisons embrace commercial work, education (numeracy, literacy and business skills), vocational training, life skills and intervention programmes (drug awareness, anger management). The prisoner’s Individual Sentence Plan (ISP) informs the balance of activities, that balance being adjusted to reflect his skills development, performance and progress through his sentence.
These activities are structured, organised and delivered by staff, peer-led or operated on an interactive and incentive basis, helping the prisoner to use his time to gain skills to aid rehabilitation and become a responsible and productive member of society.
Comments
There are plenty of OAPs and disabled people who would like their gardens sorted/their grass cut/their windows cleaned/their house painted, the list is endless. Why can't we use low catergory prisoners to do this type of work. They could also be used to generaly tidy up neighbourhoods. Again the list is endless.