CAPS LAUNCHES NEW EXPANDED COMPANIES DATABASE
The Campaign Against Prison Slavery has massively increased its on-line database of companies and organisations that directly use prison labour to maintain their profits and services thanks to a new round of Freedom of Information questions. We have now added 180 new names to our list of those with labour contracts with HM Prison Services workshops in England and Wales. Looking through these new additions will reinforce our claim that almost all of these companies and organisations use prison labour for low-skilled, mainly assembly and packing work, which provides little or no new skill-sets for prisoners to use upon release.
Yet the declared raison d'etre for prison workshops and Contract Services itself is to prepare prisoners for a crime-free life post-prison by giving them the skills they need to hold down a 'proper' job. This is a patently hollow claim, as the government's own reoffending statistics make only too clear. And things can only get worse as the year-on-year cutbacks to the prison budget leave prisoners banged up for longer periods and education provision is cut.
Even if the Tories get in at this election and carry out their planned doubling of Contract Services, little will change. The extra £6m or so brought into the prisons budget (£2bn) will be a mere drop in the ocean and would do little to alter the status quo. Almost all of these new Contract Service jobs would inevitably also be low-skilled and merely result in jobs being transferred from workers outside of prisons to workers inside prisons, and will do little to stop the steady drain, colloquially known as outsourcing, of manufacturing jobs to low-cost countries abroad.
We all hear the platitudes of politicians about cutting reoffending rates, about being "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime", but none of them are able to face up to the stark truth that crime is a product of an unequal society, the product of a society that rewards extortion and usury as long as it is legally sanctioned. A society that punishes those that are least able to look after themselves and their own and are thus forced to try and do so by means that are not legally sanctioned; a society that is designed to reinforce the very structural inequalities that perpetuate this dichotomy; a society that protects the haves and punishes the have-nots; and a society that will never significantly change reoffending rates because they are an inevitable product of that unequal society.
A wise woman once said: "If prison works, why are there so many of them?" Exactly. Clearly prison works for some. For a start it is always a good vote winner (the hang 'em, flog 'em strategy). And it seems that it is an increasingly good 'bread winner'. Since the post-Strangeways and Woolf reforms, the pacification of the UK prison system by the introduction of reforms such as the Incentives and earned Privileges Scheme, business has been looking more and more to prisons as 'a nice little earner'. With the wholesale privatisation of individual prisons the multinational 'security outsourcing' companies like G4S and Serco have made 'a killing' and more and more smaller companies are taking the opportunities of moving their business inside the prison walls to help maximise their profits and the returns to shareholders.
And what have the prisoners gained from it? Next to nothing. Admittedly, there are honourable exceptions, companies that take a pride in providing real training to the prisoners they work with in the prison workshops they run, that give prisoners real jobs when they are released. But these unfortunately are the exceptions, most see it as just another cheaper form of piecework, one with no holiday pay, sickies or employment tribunals waiting in the wings to catch them out; basically a captive workforce. Prisoners deserve better.
In future weeks we will be expanding our database, increasing the numbers of companies listed and providing more details of what they do. We will also be putting up a set of listings by individual prisons, detailing the type of workshops they run and the contracts they hold including the value of those contracts and more on the type of work the prisoners are forced to do, some for as little as 20-30p an hour. We encourage you to question these companies and organisations as to why they use prison labour and to what real benefit they honestly think a prisoner gets from slipping greetings cards into cellophane wrappers or packing bags of 12 screws or packing ironing board covers for 32 hours a week, all for a measly £8 if they are lucky. [12/04/10]
PRISON LABOUR NORTH AMERICAN STYLE
Here we cover two stories from North America that illustrate a different approach to the exploitation of prison labour. In the United States, where prison privatisation first reared its ugly head, the interplay between the different strata of the state, local County and State and even Federal authorities, have allowed new forms of exploitation of prisoners to spring up.
In fact, it is very unlikely that prison privatisation worldwide would have taken the form it does today if it wasn't for the opportunities for pecuniary gain that a handful of dodgy ex-KFC franchise owners, local Republican Party politicians and ex-FBI agents, who formed their companies after persuading local and state politicians that it was cheaper for them to house their felons in their new privately built and run prisons rather than in their local jails.
All across the Southern States towns were persuaded of the job and wealth creation possibilities of giving a home to a new private prison. Some towns even built their own, bypassing the middleman. At the State and Federal level, prison labour itself became a valuable commodity, especially in the maximum security prisons where the mandatory 15 years to life sentences for drug offences and the 'three strikes and you're out' legislation caused a boom in the long term prison population. Thus a captive workforce whom one could train-up and who would not go on strike, take holidays or need sick pay or pension provision could run your furniture production lines or man your call centres. Yes, we do mean call centres. UK companies outsource their call centres to the Indian sub-continent but in the States they use prisons. Ring to book a flight over there and you are more than likely to find yourself talking to a lifer in a US Federal prison or even in a Correctional Services of Canada (CSC) prison, not that they tell you that.
However, in recent years the boom in private prison building has come to an end as the promised savings at State and Federal levels have not come to pass and the worldwide economic downturn has put the screws on County and State expenditure on prisons. Thus, what once used to be a relatively cheap option for a particular State Department of Correction (DOC) Service to send its excess prison population to a neighbouring State, has now become somewhat of a luxury as budgets are cut back. So much so that the cutting of State prison populations has become a political priority.
At the same time, the prison companies have been forced to employ bed brokers to tout for prisoners on their behalves in order to maintain high bed occupation levels and hence keep overheads at a minimum and maintain profitability and investors' returns. Thus the squeeze is on the local prisons and their wardens to maintain. In Clayton County, Georgia the small local jail has been feeling the pinch and the warden Frank Smith has been doing his sums and has worked out that more State prisoners can save him money, not just because of the $20 a day the DOC pays Clayton County for each State prisoner it houses.
Clayton County already sends out 180 of its prisoners a day on work details, doing everything from litter picking to maintaining the County's vehicles. This saves the County something like $2.8m a year from its payroll bill, when housing and other costs such as prison staff wages are factored in. So the warden has asked the DOC for 16 more State prisoners, which could save a further $317, 485 from the budget next year. Even other local companies have cottoned on to the benefits of cutting overheads by employing prisoners. The local Water Authority employs 12 County prisoners at $30 a head as day, about half the going rate for regular employees.
Whether Clayton County will be able to continue to be able to offset local costs by exploiting what is the fifth-largest prison population in the US is a moot point, as the State grapples with rising costs. The State prison system costs $1bn a year, about 6% of the State budget, spent on housing 60,000 inmates and overseeing 150,000 probationers, numbers that have increased by 25% in the past decade. At present the State legislature is searching ways to cut prisons expenditure but not actively considering cutting the prison population.
In Canada, things are somewhat different. Whereas most countries find themselves looking for ways to cut their prison populations, the Conservative government appear to be trying to even outdo the UK by massively increasing their Federal prison population via a mixture of UK 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' policies, the introduction of a version of the Incentives and eared Privileges Scheme and wholesale building of US-style Titan prisons via the 'Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety' blueprint. The new financial year sees a 43% increase in the prison service's capital expenditure budget, though it is not known whether this means new prison or the expansion of existing ones.
However, news that CSC's six prison farms in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Ontario are to close, releasing large tracts of land to possibly host the new super-max Titan-style prisons. Around 300 prisoners currently work on the farms doing everything from mucking out, milking to butchering the animals. They will be reallocated to existing prisons and the $4m annual savings redirected into "alternative employment training that will meet the needs and realities of offenders in order to help them successfully reintegrate into society" according to the CSC.
As mentioned earlier, CSC already operates more modern forms of prison labour exploitation and the have taken on board the success of the IEP scheme in producing a compliant and productive workforce in UK prisons and wish to do the same, maximising the revenue that can be generated exploiting a captive workforce. Never mind the advocates of the prison farms who claim that the aim of the programmes were "not and never was to train farmers," but "to turn out better people." That the benefits are not only financial and vocational, but emotional as well, features that carry no weight in a modern industrial prison system. [07/04/10]
BANGED UP BEYOND BELIEF
The front page of the latest issue of Inside Time carries some interesting figures from the Prisons Inspectorate's Prisoner Survey, carried out between September 2008 and August 2009. The survey reveals the following facts:
10 or more hours spent out of cell a day:
At six local prisons surveyed only 8% of prisoners spent an average of 10 or more hours spent out of cell, leaving 92% of prisoners not reaching the recommended number of hours unlocked.
At three Young Adult prisons, on average only 10% of prisoners spent the target 10 or more hours out of cell.
At three High Security prisons, the figure was 13% of prisoners spending 10 or more hours out of cell.
At fourteen Category B and C Training prisons, the figure was only 1% higher, with an average only 14% of prisoners spending 10 or more hours out of cell.
Women in five Female prisons surveyed faired slightly better, with an average of 18% spending 10 or more hours out of cell, but this still meant that 82% of female prisoners didn’t meet the government's recommended number of hours unlocked.
The Ministry of Justice however claim that the average number of hours spent per prisoner on purposeful activity (work/training/education/offender behaviour courses, etc.) in 135 prisons in England and Wales was 5 hours every weekday during 2008-09, a figure that even the Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers found unbelievable in her recent Annual Report: "the calculation of time out of cell by the prisons inspected was not accurate or credible in most cases, and even where there was an accurate average, this disguised the diversity of experience in most prisons. In some prisons, the figure calculated could not possibly reflect the experience of any prisoner, as it was impossible for it to be achieved even by a prisoner with maximum access to work and association.." [06/04/10]
IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO TODAY
There has been a tremendous amount of media space devoted to recalling the Strangeways prisoner rebellion in the run up to the 20th anniversary, mostly in the form of reminiscences of those who took part. Paul Taylor, putative 'leader' of the prisoners, has even been commissioned by the Manchester Evening News to write a week's worth of articles and was on the news this morning warning today's prisoners not to riot as prison officers might get hurt (I thought it might be one of the BBC's April Fool's day pieces, but clearly not).
There have also been column inches devoted to Brendan O'Friel's (the governor at the time) revisionist and self-justificatory version history. “I didn't see it coming but I could have retaken the prison on day one had the Home Office allowed me to”, to paraphrase his claims. The first one may be true but later is definitely fantasy and would have led to fatalities. Interestingly, the screws involved, and the POA, itself have been largely silent on the subject; not surprising really given that endemic brutality by prison officers was the spark that set off the explosion.
Much has also been made about the reforms in the wider prison regime that came as a direct result of the Woolf inquiry into the riot: the pledge to end slopping out; the introduction of payphones (even if the call rates are currently extortionate), lower security categorisation for remand prisoners and a Prisons Ombudsman; the division of prison establishments into small and more manageable and secure units (we're still waiting).
However, there are two important results of these 'reforms' that have had no coverage: the introduction of the Incentive and earned Privileges Scheme (IEPS) and prison privatisation. The first was the government's response to Woolf's recommendation for a "compact" or "contract" for each prisoner setting out the prisoner's expectations and responsibilities whilst in the prison system. Inevitably the powers that be choose to use it to introduce a new system for controlling prisoners' behaviour, one based on earned rewards or privileges (IEPS - money, extra visits, hire a TV, be able to smoke) vs. an ostensibly separate system of punishment (the Prison Rules).
IEPS is also directly tied into the prison labour system, in that unless you are willing to work you get no prison pay, and if you don't work to a high enough standard you get that pay reduced or taken away completely. And these jobs are strictly limited, so prisoners are directly in competition with each other. The result: a well-behaved work force that do not take holidays or days off and a loath to go 'on strike'. Thus the prison system has become ripe for exploitation by private enterprise via Prison Industries' workshops and wholesale privatisation of the prisons themselves. A brave new world, and one that will become even more entrenched whoever gets in after the next election. [01/04/10]
Links:
Manchester Evening News Stories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
underclassrising.net
Eric Allison in the Guardian
