It is a commonly held view, one certainly held by the Government and most prison reformers, that the primary function of prison labour is to provide training and work experience to aid a prisoner to find a post-release job. This is certainly not backed up by the everyday experiences of many prisoners and by the history and statistics of prison labour itself.
The primary function of prison work is in fact the control of the prison population - give them something to do to keep them occupied and out of trouble. Even the Prison Service reluctantly acknowledges this "The aim of Prison Industries is to occupy prisoners in out-of-cell activity {and wherever possible} to help them gain skills, qualifications and work experience to improve their employment prospects upon release." [my emphasis] [HC193-II] Even more bluntly "The desired outcomes from prison industries are:
(i) to ensure dynamic security by providing purposeful activity at relatively low cost; and
(ii) to support education, training, and employment (ETE) outcomes on release. [HC193-II]
The order of priority is no accident.
IEP AND THE WOOLF REPORT
The backbone of the system that ensures this "dynamic security" is the Incentives and Earned Privileges Scheme (IEP). IEP was designed to ensure prisoners good behaviour and participation in purposeful activity, by offering as carrots a series of earnable privileges such as extra personal visits, time out of cell for association and even, nowadays, the right to smoke. In a wonderful piece of sophistry, the Prison Service claim there are no sticks in the system - a prisoner who fails to behave correctly or maintain progress "may be downgraded to the level below (as an administrative measure, not as a punishment imposed at adjudication)." [my emphasis] [PSO4000]
IEP was first introduced in 1995 in response to the Woolf Report into events at Strangeways prison in 1990 and a whole host of other prison rebellions in the 1980's and early 1990's. Crudely put, the Government wished to re-establish control within the prison system and put an end to the power of the 'old lags code' and working class solidarity amongst prisoners. Competition for privileges and the limited number of jobs available in prisons were to be the tools of that repression. As far as the present government is concerned, IEP has worked - "This has been a valuable policy which has played an important part in securing order and control in prisons". [David Hanson, Prisons Minister, 10/07/08]
THE BARE BONES
At the time of the Woolf Report, the prison population stood at 45,000. It has nearly doubled since then, more than 25,000 of that in the last 10 years, mainly without a concomitant increases in the prison estate. As a result, the availability of prison jobs has significantly decreased.
The fact that there are three separate UK Prison Services, all responsible to different sets of governmental organisations with different standards for the reporting of operational statistics, makes it is difficult to draw an accurate picture of current job availability in the UK. For example, we do not even the exact figures for the current prison population. In England and Wales (HMPS) the figures are released on a weekly basic, whereas in Scotland (SPS) and Northern Ireland (NIPS) the figures appear to only be released on a yearly basis. Currently [May 2009] there are around 92,000 prisoners in the UK [some 83,000 in E&W, ~7,400 in Scotland & 1,500 in N.I.], excluding the 500 or so held in Secure Children's Homes (STCs) and approximately 15,000 people detained under the Mental Health Act or up to 3,000 in Immigration detention.
Of the 92,000 in UK prisons, approximately 10% of prisoners are currently on remand, and therefore do not have to work. Additionally, using all the available sources [HC193-I / Bromley Briefings], the best estimates are that less than a third of prisoners (approx. 27,000) being in employment at any one time. Roughly 15,500 (17%) of these are in Administrative Tasks (cleaning, food production & serving, etc.) and 11,500 (12.5%) employed in workshops (the Ministry of Justice have admitted to about 10,000 in England and Wales in a recent FOI answer).
The latter have a turnover of more than £30M at market prices, but the majority of products are consumed within the prison system itself. 40% [4,700] of these prisoners however are employed producing goods for private sector companies in so-called Contract Services, which had an annual turnover of £6.1M in England and Wales in 2007-08. [SPS Industries, whose income from sales has plummeted in the past 5 years, had an income of £1.095M for the same period. NIPS has no prison industries sector.] Many of these tasks are mundane, the equivalent of home piecework e.g. packing and sealing birthday cards in cellophane slips or assembling pendant light fittings, providing “little training, qualifications or resettlement activities for prisoners.” [Costing And Pricing Guidelines For Prison Industries] Some though require higher skill levels and can provide much more on-the-job training including double glazing manufacture through to on-line marketing and website design.
Example 1: An example of a typical low-skill Contract Services job.
Packing units of 8 screws, 4 brass picture plates and a label in 600 blister packs. The job is priced at £7.20, 50% goes to the prison, £2.40 goes to the packer for roughly 6 hours work and the rest is split between the final bulk packers, the stores person, workshop cleaner, etc. |
The average weekly wage across the UK for an employed prisoner* is £8.00, slightly less than the average British child receives a week in pocket money according to a 2007 Halifax Building Society survey. The minimum pay rate is £4.00 and for those willing to work but without a job or those classed as short-term sick the rate is £2.50 a week. At the top end of the scale, a few prisoners in privately run prisons and those on day release from open prison may earn over £30. These basic pay rates are exactly the same as they were when the IEP scheme was introduced in 1995
‘GIS A JOB’
Under IEP it can be argued that it is prison officers (POs) rather than the prisoners themselves that have benefited the most from its introduction. Home Office research commissioned in 1999 showed “an increase in staff confidence and control” but a “reductions in favourable perceptions of staff fairness, relations with staff, regime fairness”, both due to POs having greater discretionary powers under IEP than before. This continues to be the case across the system.
One particular ongoing bone of contention is that jobs are largely in the gift of POs and, as such, they can be used as a basis for punishment and reward. The system is seen to operate in an arbitrary and often vindictive manner. Cross a PO and you could find yourself given the worst job available or with no job at all as an alternative to being up on a charge before the Governor. Or maybe you’ll just find your pay at the end of the week is mysteriously ‘short’.
Example 2: Additional time on your sentence for refusing to work.
One correspondent has told of how, within 1 year of his release, he refused to fold pieces of paper for mail shots 7.5 hours a day, 5 days a week “because he found it degrading and an insult to the prisoners’ intelligence”. His stand resulted in a move back to closed conditions and ultimately cost him 2 years on his sentence. |
Prison work is also not a thing of choice. You have no right to refuse work and if you do you will be punished. Initially it will be loss of privileges already earned, such as access to the canteen or extra visits. Then comes downgrading of IEP level or 50% loss of earnings. Worse still are segregation and extra days on your sentence. Prisoners pursuing further education courses have even been refused access to educational materials as punishment, despite the Prison Services mantra in recent years of “education, education, education”.
EXPLOITABLE RESOURCE
It is no coincidence that the introduction of IEP also coincided with the beginnings of the Prison Industrial Complex in the UK. Prisoners were now seen as a valuable resource to be exploited through the new concept of Contract Services. Previously, the poor quality of prison-produced goods meant that they were only fit for internal consumption but, with IEP, a system now existed to ensure that the ‘workers’ were forced to maintain higher quality standards.
This also meant that this valuable resource could be exploited directly by the private sector. Contrary to Article 2.2c of the ILO Forced Labour Convention No. 29, 10% of all UK prisoners have been handed over to private prisons to be exploited as these multinationals see fit. In turn, these prisoners are sub-contracted out to secondary companies, who run evening & even weekend work sessions to help maximise their profits, all without the need for sick or holiday pay or employment laws.
Example 3: Work and training in private prisons.
One privately run prison internet media company pays their prisoners as little as £9.50 a week during their training course. The prisoners often deal with 3 corporate clients a day, where each client is being charged £200 a hour for the work the prisoners do in on-line marketing, SWOT analysis & strategy, etc. These prisoners are largely Category C, taking up to 4 years to work through to Category D before their release and most of their skills would be obsolete by release. |
PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY?
Despite the push to exploit the potential of prison labour, only a third of the prison population is engaged in work activities at any one time. This has a direct impact on the average time out of cells and purposeful activity of prisoners. In 2006 the average time outside of cell for each prisoner was 10hrs during the core day (11.5 in private prisons). Prisoners in local prisons suffer the most with 30-40%, sometimes over 50%, spending 20-22 hours a day in their cells. This is a direct result of the unevenly distribution of the available non-Administrative Tasks jobs across the prison estate, with most being in training prisons.
The ‘standard core week’ now stands at it’s lowest level for nearly 40 years due to government’s need to save £60M a year from prison budgets. Prisoners no longer work on Friday afternoons and are now confined to their cells from Friday lunchtime till Monday morning, except for a total of 2 1/2 hours for slopping out and meals (this is estimated to save £6.4m yearly from the budget). The end result is that purposeful activity now averages only 3.6 hours a day.
Prison overcrowding has also had a profound effect on the availability of work and, hence, purposeful activity figures. As a consequence, the Government was forced to remove purposeful activity from the list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in 2003-04. Ministers now claim that outcome-based KPIs introduced in respect of education, rehabilitation and resettlement provide a better demonstration of the efforts to equip prisoners to be less likely to offend on release.
EDUCATION & TRAINING vs. EMPLOYMENT?
The lack of education, training and employment has been identified by the Home Office as the single greatest factor behind offending, exceeding all other factors, including housing, relationships, drug and alcohol abuse. [HORS291] Prisoners released without a job are twice as likely to reoffend as those released with an ETE placement. 76 per cent of prisoners leave prison without a job, in part due to the fact that 60% of employers refuse to recruit ex-prisoners, or educational placement. Of the third that have an ETE placement, only 15% arranged it through the prison.
Yet ETE provision continues to be woefully patchy and inconsistent with workshop employment being promoted over education and training. In EPS prisons in 2007, prisoners were still getting on average 50p less in wages for being on educational course than for working. This in workshops where much of the work experience available does not relate to the outside job market, the focus being mainly on traditional skills. Some prisoners feel that they might as well still be sewing mailbags
Short-term prisoners are one of the most disadvantaged groups here. "Two thirds of prisoners are sentenced to prison for less than a year. Over half of these will be reconvicted within two years. The fact that serving a short sentence is one of the most common reasons given for excluding inmates from programmes is a source of concern." [HORS226]
PRISON WORK DOSEN’T WORK
Too many prisoners continue to suffer under the inequities of the present regime. It is time for the Government to make its mind up about the Prison Service. Is it to be a modern industrialised gulag, paying third world wages, or is its role to be to modify and control offending behaviour? If it is the latter, then it can only continue to function as a sticking plaster over the ills of society at large, the same role IEP has played since 1995 within the Prison service itself.
References:
Harper G. and Chitty C. (Eds.), The Impact Of Corrections On Re-Offending: A Review Of ‘What Works’ [3rd edn.], Home Office Research Study 291, 2005, Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, TSO, London.
Liebling A., Muir G., Gerry Rose and Bottoms A., Incentives And Earned Privileges For Prisoners – An Evaluation, Research Findings No. 87, 1999, Home Office Research, Development And Statistics Directorate, HMSO, London.
Webster R, Hedderman C, Turnbull P.J. & May T., Building Bridges To Employment
For Prisoners, Home Office Research Study 226, 2001, Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, TSO, London.
- Bromely Briefings Prison Factfile, June 2009, Prison Reform Trust.
- Costing And Pricing Guidelines For Prison Industries [Internal HMPS Intranet Document].
- PSO4000, Incentives and Earned Privileges, 18/10/2006, HMPS.
- Rehabilitation of Prisoners, First Report of Session 2004–05, Vol. I: Report, together with formal minutes, House Of Commons Papers 2004, HC193-I, TO, London.
- Rehabilitation Of Prisoners: First Report Of Session 2004-05. Vol. 2: Oral And Written Evidence, House Of Commons Papers 2004, HC193-II, TO, London.
