CAPS News

THE DAILY EXPRESS NON-STORY

It is typical of the redtops and even the 'quality' Tory press to take cheap shots at prisoners and to generally bang the 'hang 'em, flog 'em' drum, but the Express have excelled themselves with the 'Scandal As Prisoners Claim £100m In Benefits' non-story. The article is laughable; so farcical we all should be rolling in the aisles in stitches, if it was not for the fact that the Express' readers just lap up this sort of disinformation as it panders to their ignorance and anti-prisoner prejudices.

A cursory glance at the article appears to show that the paper is claiming that this £100m is being paid in 'unemployment' and 'sickness benefits' to prisoners, but a closer look reveals that "over three years, the Ministry of Justice has paid out a total of £93.5million in “earnings” to convicted criminals", hidden in typical tabloid fashion deep in the article so you would just as likely miss it because your Express-reading blood would already be at boiling point.

So let's have a good look at this story. First off, this is hardly a 'revelation'. The Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) scheme has been in place since 1995 and the £2.50 rate for those willing to work but unemployed because there are not enough jobs (a typical situation in local jails across the country) is the same now as it was then. As is the £3.25 'unemployment' rate. Both are paid to prisoners irrespective of whether they are 'convicted criminals' in the words of the Express or the 10% or so of prisoners at any one time on remand, and therefore technically innocent (though clearly not in the eyes of Donna Bowater, author of this tripe).

The IEP scheme was brought in in the wake of the Strangeways prisoners’ rebellion as a 'carrot and stick' control method [see: Are Prisoners Slaves?). Toe the line and work and you'll get rewarded, refuse to work and you get nothing. And just to keep the prisoners on their toes they would have to compete for a strictly limited number of jobs, there only being enough for a third of the prison population. Those god boys and girls will then get rewarded with more pay and more privileges, whereas those who do not acquiese get their pay rates reduced and earn fewer 'earned privileges'.

Now obviously there had to be a safety valve for those willing but unable to work through no fault of their own as there's not enough work to go round, hence the unemployed and sick rates. Since then participation in education is also paid under IEP, so the unemployed rate is paid to fewer and fewer prisoners - it would be interesting to find out exactly how many but we are sure that the figures are not centrally collated and therefore not open to a FOI question (being too expensive to ascertain and therefore excluded).

Back to the article:

"The jail benefits culture came to light when an inmate wrote to national prison newspaper Inside Time to find out how much he could claim." No it didn't. This sort of letter has been appearing in Inside Time since it was launched. What in fact appears to have happened is that somebody pointed out the letter to a Sunday Mercury reporter who wrote a non-story about it yesterday, the same sort of stupid outrage piece that the Express is now doing because someone at the Express happened to see the Sunday Mercury article and copied it.

"It was admitted that prisons where workshops are full allow inmates to claim £2.50 a week in unemployment benefits and the same in sick pay." "Inmates across the country can claim dole money if they are able to work but cannot find a job within the prison service." Both incorrect, the IEP sick rate (including those too old or infirmed to work) is £3.25 (a figure the Mercury at least managed to get right, its is not 'the dole' and one does not claim it. It is 'awarded' by the powers that be based upon your behaviour.

"Around 10,000 prisoners earn £4 a week on prison-run workshops while others work for external companies, such as Virgin Air where they repack headphones." Oh dear! Donna has obviously been reading the CAPS site but she can't even get the plagiarism right. £4 is the basic rate and few prisoners working in prison workshops are paid that any longer. The average appears to be somewhere around £8, higher in private prisons. Plus, most prisoners work in Administrative Tasks not prison workshops, as you would have read on the CAPS site.

Then we get the arrant hypocrisy of Dominic Grieve “It’s a reflection of its inability to provide purposeful work for all prisoners that it is now being obliged to make these payments when no work is being done.” The Tories brought the IEP scheme in, 4 years after the conclusion of the Woolf report, and back then there was even fewer prison workshop jobs unless you count the non-job of either sewing or unpicking mailbags, depending on which nick you were in. [1]

That the Tories want to double prison workshop provision if they get in is nothing to trumpet about either. The likelihood is that the new jobs will be exactly the same monotonous, low skill jobs that exist in prison nowadays, jobs that provide little 'purpose' and have little rehabilitation value. Unless of course one wants a job 'on the out' packing screws or greeting cards.

Then there is the Philip Davies rant: “It strikes me as being the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever heard. I always thought the criteria for receiving unemployment benefit is that you were available for work and you can’t be available for work if you’re in prison." It just goes to show you how ill-informed the average Tory MP really is.

"Taxpayers’ money is being wasted. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life. The public will be absolutely incredulous that this could possibly even be happening. I just can’t even begin to believe it. You couldn’t make it up, and we wonder why we’re in so much debt.” Surely he means credulous, as in 'as credulous as I am'? The fact is that £100m is only 5% of the £2bn prison budget, a small price to pay to keep the lid on the prison system and not go back to the riots of the '70s and '80s one would have thought. It certainly would be interesting to hear his comments if a prison did go up in flames again?

And lets not even bother with the self-elected 'taxpayers’ leaders', who can't even get their sums right - 82,000 prisoners @ £2bn per year = £24,390 NOT £45,000.

Oh! And just in case you were wondering about how much this £100m means to the average prisoners here is a quick back-of-a-fag-packet calculation: [2]

82,000 x 1/3 x £2.50 x 3 x 52 = £10,660,000 at the IEP unemployment rate.

£93,500,000 - £10,660,000 = £82,840,000

£82,840,000 / (82,000 x 2/3) / 52 / 3 = £9.71 for a 32 hour week = 30p per hour.

1] Long after the contract with Royal Mail ended, prisoners still sewed mailbags, which were then shipped to another prison, where prisoners unpicked them. A truly useful occupation.
2] Taking the average prison population over the past 3 years as 82,000 and that roughly two-thirds of the prison population are in work or education.

[08/03/10]

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SPS FAULDHOUSE DEPOT TO CLOSE

News filtering out of the Scottish Prison Service is that SPS Industries and the Fauldhouse depot will have ceased to exist in their current format by April next year. All Industries staff will by then have been redeployed to other areas of the prison estate, and the work currently carried out at Fauldhouse will continue at individual establishments.

Replacing the stores will be a new National Training Facility which, according to the Project Information, is ", a bespoke facility is required to be built which replicates a typical prison accommodation unit setting" for delivering "training in incident management within a safe environment" that replicates "an authentic prison setting." i.e. riot training for Tornado Teams.

The "typical prison facility model within the identified area in SPS Central Stores, Fauldhouse", will consist of:
· Prisoner accommodation cells on two storeys;
· Stairways and gallery walkways for access/egress from those cells;
· Dining area and multi-function room area for prisoners;
· Staff desk, association area and access to cell area;
· Suite of offices to accommodate management;
· First aid room;
· Cleaners cupboard;
· Shower, toilet and changing facilities for male and female staff including DDA amenities;
· Kit store;
· Store room; and
· Training room with tea bar facilities.
The Prequalification Questionnaire for the project states "that all walls will be made from timber stud (with fair faced 19 mm plywood) while all stairways, walkways, balustrades and handrails shall be formed in steel and painted."

Construction of the replica cells in the old disused part of Fauldhouse was originally planned to be completed by the end of the summer but we now understand that it will be finished and operational by December this year. [08/11/09]

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THE CORONERS AND JUSTICE BILL

Peers are due to vote today on a bill to bring UK law into line with Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights outlawing forced labour. Currently there are no criminal statutes that explicitly outlaw involuntary servitude. The House of Lords will vote on the creation of two criminal offences when they debate the Coroners and Justice Bill: the holding of someone in servitude, punishable of up to 14 years in prison, and the subjecting of someone to forced labour, punishable of up to 7 years in prison.

Of course the UK is a signatory to both the ILO Convention on Forced Labour and the ECHR (with specific opt-outs) but both specifically allow for forced labour as part of 'normal civic obligations', military service, for conscientious objectors or in times of national emergency. The other area specifically excluded from all international forced labour conventions and law is in detention, be that in prison, immigration detention and those in detention "for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts, or vagrants" [ECHR Article 5].

Now we do not wish to in any way take attention away from the plight of the thousands of people who are trafficked into the country and forced into involuntary servitude, those forced to labour in domestic servitude, in agriculture, construction, food processing and packaging, nursing, hospitality, or the restaurant trade. Nor do we want to diminish the seriousness of the crime being perpetuated against them.

Instead, we merely wish to point out that no one, whether they are exploited by relatives or employers who take away their passport and force them to work, if it is a people trafficker who forces them into servitude to pay off the 'debt' of their transportation or if it is the state forcing prisoners to work for the Prison Service or some private company to pay off their 'debt to society'/earn 'privileges' and peanuts in wages, and so 'progress their sentence', should be "held in slavery or servitude" or be "required to perform forced or compulsory labour." [26/10/09]

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INSIDE THE SELL BLOCKS

Three interesting articles have just appeared in the Guardian newspaper: Inside The Sell Blocks: Major companies are using prisoners as cheap labour through secretive government contracts. But who else benefits? by Richard Cookson and Phil Chamberlain, Prisoners Promised 'Real Wages' Under The Tories by the same two authors and A Fair Day's Prison Work? by the Guardian's prisons correspondent Eric Allison.

The origins of the first piece date back more than three years to two separate Freedom of Information requests that the two freelance journalists put in to the Prison Service. What they wanted to know was which limited companies currently had contracts for prisoners to carry out paid work at two separate listed sets of prisons and Immigration Removal Centres, the type of work carried out and how much each contract was worth. Needless to say both requests were turned down, initially on the grounds of cost (there is a statutory limit of £600 cost in office hours per request). This excuse for withholding information is something that many people and organisations, including CAPS, have regularly run into.

They then asked for clarification from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), along the lines of home many prisons could they get the information about for their £600. The MoJ's response to that was it was considering withholding the information under Section 43, commercial confidentiality, again CAPS has been refused even seemingly mundane information under this catch-all.

Nine full months went by before the MoJ grudgingly made a partial disclosure of information, the remainder being withheld under Sect. 43 (2). An internal review (first stage appeal against the decision) was immediately made. Eight months later the review had still not been completed. A formal complaint was made to the Information Commissioner about the MoJ's prevarication and eventually a year and a half after the original request the refusal was upheld.

So the same month, June 2007, another formal complaint was made to the Information Commissioner but it wasn't until February this year that the Commissioner started his investigation! This included research on the internet, looking at the Prison Service website and confirming that there are no confidentiality clauses in prison labour contracts. The Commissioner "also considered the views of a body which is against the use of prison labour - Campaign Against Prison Slavery."

In the end the Commissioner found that the withheld information should have been disclosed; that the information was not supplied within the stipulated period in breach of the FOI Act; that the use of the Fees Regulations to extend the time for consideration of the request was erroneous; the delay of almost eight months which the public authority took to deal with the matter was not a reasonable timescale, which constitutes a breach of Section 17(3) of the Act; and that there was insufficient evidence that a Section 43 refusal was appropriate. [Decision 1, Decision 2]

In the latter long consideration of the effect of disclosure on the commercial interests both of NOMS and of the companies using prison labour, the latter providing what the Commissioner found to by-and-large spurious arguments. One of which is covered in the following:

"Reference was made to serious threats and activities being undertaken by groups actively against the use of prison labour. A specific example was provided as evidence and the Commissioner therefore investigated the validity of this claim. He noted that, prior to the time of the request, some ‘targeting’ against a company was evident, however, he further noted that it did not appear to have resulted in anything more than a leafleting campaign or the publishing of a number of unfavourable articles about that company’s use of prison labour. The Commissioner does not therefore accept the contractor’s view that providing the information would, or would be likely to, result in a loss of business."

As a result of the Commissioner's decision Rich and Phil were able to acquire the information they had originally requested. They were also able to pursue their trade and ask direct questions of the companies involved. The results are the Inside The Sell Blocks and a new website prisonlabour.org.uk, which lists all the information they acquired. And it seems that they will be continuing with the project; "Got to make those years of waiting count for something I guess," Phil says on a response to a post about the saga on the FOI News blog.

Rich and Phil's second article Prisoners Promised 'Real Wages' Under The Tories draws on their first one and the fact that Edward Garnier, who at the time was Shadow Justice Minister, had said that the Tories are planning on encouraging more private companies and charities to offer work and training in jails after, as seems likely, they have won the next election. This idea almost certainly derives from a report called Locked Up Potential published by Iain Duncan Smith's think tank The Centre for Social Justice. His Prison Reform Working Group was headed by that gamekeeper turned poacher turned gamekeeper and well-know prisoners' friend Jonathan Aitken.

One of their recommendations was to double the size of Contract Services, the section of Prison Industries that provides prison labour to private companies, the very same sort of companies that mainly provide the very same sort of work Aitken describes in the Inside The Sell Blocks article: "My first experience of prison work was at Belmarsh when I folded plastic bags into tiny squares and put them in a plastic envelope. If you folded 400 in a morning - which would have been an heroic effort - you could expect 50p. Nobody was motivated. The other job I did was fixing a washer to a screw, and that was equally monotonous." Any more of this type of work and we will be "getting back to the spirit of sewing mailbags or getting on a treadmill," as he also says in the article.

Last, but not least, is Eric Allison's piece A Fair Day's Prison Work? in the Society section's JoePublic blog. This short opinion piece has already started of a lively debate on the Guardian website which will hopefully continue for a while and will encourage people to start thinking about the issue of prison labour and even visit this site. [10/09/09]

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NEW SPS UPDATE

The latest news coming out of the Scottish Prison Service is that the release of the Industries review has been delayed yet again. Apparently it has been decided that "further work was necessary, to provide the level of detail appropriate, to make informed decisions on what activities that prisoners should engage in to help with the aim of reducing recidivism" according to a Freedom of Information request. "This work was allocated to a senior manager in June 2009 and is now ongoing. As a result of the level of detail being analysed as part of this task, it is unlikely that it will concluded until 2010. [18/09/09]

FINE CELL WORK

In the Independent on Sunday 16 Aug there was an article about Anne Tree and the Fine Cell Work charity she set up entitled 'They all got the needle with me' (also on-line under the slightly more comprehensible title 'Meet the aristocrat who's got prisoners in stitches'). Fine Cell Work, for those who have not come across it before in the pages of the Sunday colour supplements or who have not seen its products in the V&A or heard about its commissioning to recreate tapestries for the newly refurbished Dover Castle, is "a social enterprise that teaches needlework to prison inmates and sells their products", to quote their website.

Ms. Tree herself is the daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire and freely refers to herself as "a Victorian do-gooder who had a calling to help people in prison who weren't being helped otherwise." In her time she has been a prison visitor, deputy entertainments officer at Wandsworth Prison and introduced ex-Labour Cabinet minister Lord Longford to Myra Hindley.

Her plan for Fine Cell Work was "to provide prisoners with "real" work to do while in jail that would pay them enough to provide a small nest egg to ease their re-entry into society on release." A laudable sentiment you would say. However, some would say the reality is slightly different.

The article claims that the charity "employs 350 inmates in 26 prisons ... each earning up to £500 a year making intricate, high-quality cushion covers and rugs." Sounds good, but the Fine Cell Work website, which displays prisoner-made cushions for sale at £50-£195 and patchwork quits costing up to £1200, claims that the 403 prisoners it employed in 2008 earned £61,890. A swift calculation using those figures gives an average of £153 each that year or less than £3 for the 20 hours work a week the average prisoner works.

The fact that the work is done by prisoners banged-up in their cells on their own time should mean that what they earn is extra to their IEP wages and might lead to the prisoners accruing a "small nest egg" over the average 3 years they work for the charity. Yet, a wage rate of 15p an hour is not particularly good, even by prison standards.

That is not to say that Fine Cell Work does not also give an opportunity for prisoners, 80% of whom are men, to learn new skills and many Fine Cell Work alumini testify to benefits like increased self-confidence and self-worth. And we certainly need more social enterprises to be established in UK prisons to help create some meaningful work opportunities for prisoners whose opportunities are often limited to cleaning, laundry and kitchen work or some mind-numbing low-skill high-tedium Contract Services job. Unfortunately the only notable examples of prison-based social enterprises have been the defunct Barbed design studio at HMP Coldingley, The Clink restaurant at HMP High Down and the market gardening Community Interest Company at HMP Erlestoke.

Yet we really need projects that prisoners can become actively involved in the day-to-day running of as well as gaining real skills and financial benefit from, rather than serving food to people in a restaurant that you are unable to eat in and from which you gain no financial benefit other that normal prison wages, as happens at The Clink. To that end the Community Interest Company model as used at Erlestoke is much the preferable because of the real involvement of the prisoners themselves in running the enterprise rather than it just being paid lip service by the Prison Service. [18/08/09]