Rehabilitation a distant second

Rehabilitation a distant second

By: John Bowden - HMP Glenochil

John Bowden wonders why the Ministry of Justice does not get into step with the Scottish Prison Service and provide a more integrated system of training opportunities for prisoners.

Some of you reading this piece will be about to go to or possibly have just been to your prison employment. However, the majority of you will not have had an opportunity to work even if you want to. The sad fact is that whatever Prison Service propaganda tells you, there are just not enough jobs to go around, and whilst there are no centralised figures about exactly how many jobs are available within the prison estate, we can certainly make an educated guess.

It works out that there are only enough jobs for about one third of the prison population; with around 27,600 being in employment at any given time. Roughly 16,800 (20% of the total population) are in administrative tasks such as cleaning, food production and serving, whilst 10,000 (13%) are employed in workshops (the Ministry of Justice has admitted to about 10,000 in England and Wales in a recent Freedom of Information response). In addition, these jobs are unevenly distributed across the estate, with the majority of non-administrative tasks being in training prisons.

If you are a short-term prisoner or on remand, and reading this in a local prison, then the chances are you do not have a job and have little or no hope of getting one. In some local prisons more than 40% of prisoners can find themselves unemployed and banged-up in their cells for 20-22 hours a day. In fact most of those classified as ‘employed’ are actually only attending offender behaviour modification programmes or other forms of ‘education and training', rather than attending workshops or on administrative tasks.

This distinct lack of enough jobs to go around has got progressively worse as the overcrowding situation has increased. If you build new prisons, you build new workshops and create new administrative task employment. If you put two or three prisoners in a cell once used by only one, the only people you make more work for are prison staff. However this suits the prison authorities in one way because the fewer the jobs the more the competition and the less likely prisoners are to be disruptive, as they might stymie their chances of getting more than the current unemployed rate of £2.50 a week; this is a direct result of the way that the Prison Service and the Government use the Woolf Report recommendation (see Ben Gunn's article After Woolf - Injustice Still Rules, Inside Time November 2008) to introduce the IEP scheme.

Prison work itself has changed over the years. Gone are the days of breaking rocks or the treadmill. Gone too are the days when prisoners not only made their own uniforms but also the uniforms of their warders.

This came to a stop when complaints from prison officers about the poor quality of the finished goods grew too loud to ignore; except that nowadays prisoners still have to make most of the clothes they wear – everything from overalls to those itchy grey socks and Y-fronts; and now we even get to make the cell doors and security grills we live behind.

However, many of the items produced in prison workshops are still considered to be of such poor workmanship that the general public would never buy them if given the option. And who could really blame the lack of pride prisoners have in their work; given the appallingly low ‘wages’ we receive for our efforts. We may no longer sew mailbags only for them to be unpicked by prisoners in a neighbouring nick, when far too many were being produced, but most jobs we do are every bit as soul-destroying and unproductive.

Take Contract Services for example; this is becoming a more important part of Prison Industries as financial pressure grows on the Prison Service. In 2007-08, Contract Services in England & Wales had a turnover of £6 million; so it’s hardly chicken-feed we are talking about. However that’s exactly what prisoners who work for Contract Services are paid, and most of the jobs supplied by their 370 customers are mind-numbingly boring; such as untangling in-flight entertainment earphones and repackaging them for Virgin Airways; packing plastic spoons into cellophane wrappers for Sainsburys and packing small hardware and plumbing items such as screws, picture fittings and tap washers for Bulk Hardware.

The list goes on, as do those monotonous jobs. Just where are the training opportunities in such employment? What are the skills they are meant to provide prisoners with? If the government is indeed as serious as it claims to be about providing prisoners with training and the necessary skills to find work at the end of their sentence, why does the Prison Service continue to pursue contracts that provide ‘no-skill’ employment?

An estimated 76% of people leave prison without a job, and of those that do have employment only 15% arranged it through the prison. Statistically, those that leave prison without a job are twice as likely to re-offend as those with employment lined up; therefore it seems blindingly obvious where the government should be putting its money if it is serious about rehabilitating offenders. However, Jack Straw has demonstrated what the government’s position really is: prisons are primarily for punishment, with rehabilitation a distant second.

The Campaign against Prison Slavery (CAPS) was formed in 2002 by former prisoners and prison support groups to campaign against forced work in general and the Incentives & Earned Privileges Scheme (IEPS) in particular. The campaign continues to rely mainly on the input of prisoners supplying us with information on abuses, and runs a website where we ‘name and shame’ certain companies. The campaign has had notable success here in Scotland, with a number of high profile companies pulling out of contracts with Scottish Prison Service industries. This in turn has led to a thorough and ongoing review of SPS industries, and a welcome move towards what appears to be a more integrated system of training - with companies offering employment to trainees at the end of their sentences.

South of the border the picture is somewhat different because unlike in Scotland, prison industries in England & Wales is not centralized, with contracts negotiated at local level by governors, therefore information about the various firms involved is more difficult to obtain; indeed it would now appear that the Ministry of Justice, unlike the Scottish Prison Service, has made a policy decision not to cooperate by supplying CAPS with information through legitimate Freedom of Information requests; claiming commercial confidentiality. We are in the process of appealing against this stance.

You can contact the CAPS campaign at: PO Box 74, Brighton BN1 4ZQ or againstprisonslavery@riseup.net. www.againstprisonslavery.org