Prison education is ripe for reform

Prison education is ripe for reform

The latest government report on prison education recognises that employability is the key to rehabilitation, but there remain difficulties that may let offenders down

Carolina Bracken
The Guardian, Tuesday 7 June 2011

Inside HMP Albany on the Isle of Wight, prisoners work on embroidery during a class. There are not enough work places for the 80,000-strong prison population. Photograph: Matt Watson

In many ways, the latest government report on prison education has great potential. Based on the compelling correlation between employment and reduced reoffending, Making Prisons Work recognises prison education as the key to enhancing offenders' employability, and the cornerstone behind the much-heralded "rehabilitation revolution".

Many offenders enter prison with an entirely negative experience of education and work; almost half were unemployed in the year before arriving in custody, and 80% have the literacy skills expected of an 11-year-old. Prison can provide a stable environment in which prisoners develop the skills that will enable them to follow a life in employment and out of crime.

Yet, while efforts to place offender learning at the heart of the prison regime are laudable, three main difficulties permeate the vision – each potentially undermining the government's entire rehabilitative mission.

First, numerous promises in the report have been made and broken many times before. Since 2004, prison education has purportedly been a key government priority, and funding for offender learning almost trebled between 2001 and 2005 to £151m. Nevertheless, much has been wasted, absorbed by a catalogue of institutional obstacles and misguided targets. In a number of core areas, Making Prisons Work tackles the symptoms rather than the causes of these barriers that have long suffocated reformative efforts.

For instance, the perpetual movement of offenders between different prisons causes tremendous disruption to work and education. Yet the report makes no attempt to reduce this "churn" directly. Dismissing such movement as "unavoidable", it seeks only to mitigate its effects by coordinating learning across prison "clusters".

Additionally, while the report identifies the need to involve a wider range of providers, there is no guarantee that sufficient work will be sourced. Prison industries currently offer approximately 9,000 places a day for prisoners – a far cry from the number needed for the 80,000-strong prison population.

Even if enough employers can be tempted into prison work, the prisons may be unable to accommodate them. Furthermore, creating a prison regime that imposes real-world expectations on learners will place demands on prison staff that, without substantial additional funding, they will simply be unable to meet. The current average working week in prison – some 22 hours – is self-evidently insufficient.

In the absence of enough work places and staff support, some offenders will continue to slip through the net. Worse still, those at highest risk of reoffending are liable to be most neglected. Vulnerabilities within payment-by-result schemes risk creating perverse incentives to skew provision towards those least likely to reoffend. More prolific offenders could be left by the wayside, deemed not worth the investment gamble, given the diminished chance of a successful outcome. This situation can only be exacerbated by the nonsensical reluctance to bring prisoners serving fewer than 12 months under post-release supervision.

A further risk is that interventions will be chosen for financial reasons. While the paper recognises the invaluable role of the Virtual Campus, the secure intranet service that has been successfully piloted in two regions, this will be implemented only "as resources permit", it says. Given the immense difficulties engendered by limited ICT access, both in custody and after release, the roll-out of the Virtual Campus should be made a funding priority.

Prison education can have substantial financial benefits for the public purse; the Ministry of Justice has calculated that vocational interventions can result in savings of up to £97,000 per offender. But money spent must be understood as an investment; it is imperative that the government does not follow the false economy of choosing provision based on cost, rather than on learners' needs.

In placing employability as the goal of punitive incarceration, Making Prison Work undoubtedly sets the right agenda. What is less certain, however, is whether these plans will translate into reality.

Without rehabilitation, prison offers no long-term social remedy for the reoffending epidemic. Having identified the crux of how to reduce recidivism, the coalition's vision must now take the next steps where previous government initiatives have stumbled, and end the long-standing paralysis in reform of prison education.

• Carolina Bracken is criminal justice research fellow at Civitas thinktank