In April the Howard League released a report on prison labour entitled ’Business Behind Bars’. The report it turned out was the League’s contribution to what appears to have started out as a joint collaborative project [1] with Policy Exchange, one ostensibly "exploring the implementation of real work in prison". However, the Howard League report received almost no media coverage unlike the following month's release of Policy Exchange’s ’Inside Job’ report, which was given the full treatment courtesy of the think tank’s PR department, resulting in a deal of press, TV and blogosphere attention. [2] Whilst marshalling many of the same and not particularly novel arguments in defending their respective corners, liberal prison reformers vs. right wing pro-business ideologues, the most interesting and revealing elements of this two-pronged assault on the lack of ’real work’ in prisons are, once one has gotten over some of the bizarre errors in the Policy Exchange document that appear to betray a woeful ignorance of the prison system, together with the often contradictory and incoherent arguments put forward by both organisations, the two very different agendas these reports pursue.

On The Same Page

One of the cornerstones of the Tory-led ’Rehabilitation Revolution’ is the notion that prisons should be required to "become places of hard work and industry" and that all prisoners ultimately should work a 40 hour week. Policy Exchange (PE) and the Howard League (HL), to their credit, obviously realised that trying to establish the latter principle was a total non-starter in such a monolithic organisation as the Prison Service. Instead they have based their proposals on what they see are much more realistic projections for possible ’real work in prison’ schemes and, initially using the ideas set out in ’Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders’ [3] together with HL’s experiences of trying to run the Barbed design studio in HMP Coldingley, it is unsurprising that both organisations have come up with the same set of core proposals:
● Category C training prisons as the most suitable institutions to house ’real work’ schemes;
● prisoners serving sentences of 4 or more years best suited for ’real work’ schemes (though PE appear to be somewhat confused over this issue as they stipulate "at least two years remaining to serve on a sentence", obviously meaning within ’to serve in prison’ [see Box 4]);
● prisoners should be free from drugs, including those on maintenance regimes, and have sufficient literacy and numeracy (reading age 11+ according to PE);
● the private companies using in-prison labour should be able to chose the prisoners they employ (HL see this interview process as being the process by which those not fulfilling the previous criteria should be weeded out but PE suggest that the Prison Service should do the weeding via suggested new Category W and Worker IEP levels [see below];
● these companies should directly employ the prisoner via a contract; prisoners should pay tax and N.I. as well as requiring prisoners to donate a proportion of their wages to a victim’s fund as a condition of their employment (both organisations resort to this sophistic use of language - "[t]his individual deduction from earnings for victims, accepted as a condition of employment, represents a form of restorative justice as individuals are making reparations themselves rather than through compulsion" [Inside Job, p.59] and "[t]his better represents restorative justice, as individuals are making reparations themselves rather than through compulsion" [Business Behind Bars, p.37]);
● government plans to introduce the Prisoners’ Earnings Act 1996 are unnecessary (though PE insist on calling it the Prisoner Earnings Act for some reason);
● ’real work’ schemes should not be allowed to affect the local economy through unfair competition i.e. undercutting local business or coming into direct competition to the local labour market;
● government should use ’real work’ schemes to help repatriate previously offshored jobs (PE bizarrely see such schemes as being beneficial in that "[d]epending on the level of prison wages" (i.e. if they are low enough) previously offshored jobs might be repatriated and that "[p]rison labour offers a potential alternative to offshoring that is less harmful to the local community and is not direct competition to the local labour market"!? Interestingly, HL uses this as an argument in favour of higher and ’fair wages’ for prisoners. [see Box 1]);
● individual prison governors should be free to tout for business and negotiate contracts;
● the introduction of ’real work’ schemes requires the operation of dynamic security processes (though PE do not explicitly use this terminology) and the need for more flexible staffing patterns, with changes being made to restrictive regulations like Bulletin 8 [prison officers’ shift patterns], extending the Core Week [the amount of time prisoners are supposed to spend in activities] and doing away with the 2 hour lunch time bang up; and
● there needs to be a greater transparency about the companies using prison labour and the contracts negotiated.

A Divergence Of Opinion

Nothing too surprising or that controversial there then, especially given their mandate? Yet even within these areas of apparently common agreement we can see some subtle (and not so subtle) points of disagreement that clearly stem from their differing ideological, polemical and experiential standpoints. [4] For example, the Howard League, having a wider knowledge of the prison system as well as being in regular contact with inmates, is the more prisoner-friendly of the two organisations and argues that prisoners must "receive a fair wage for work undertaken or the rate for the job [HL, p.34] i.e. at or above the National Minimum Wage (even though, under the 1998 Act, a prisoner "does not qualify for the national minimum wage in respect of any work which he does in pursuance of prison rules") and be entitled to normal protection under employment legislation. Indeed, BBB goes further and states that "[l]ower and punitive rates of pay, while encouraging businesses to engage in real work in prison, will disincentivise work for prisoners and serve only to exploit." [HL, p.35]

Compare that to Policy Exchange's stance. Firstly, they are much less informed about prisons [Box 2 & 4] and display the standard tabloid-led cynicism towards prisoners in general, pursuing the same tired old saw about TVs, games consoles and gym equipment. [5] In fact, their whole approach to the needs of the respective participants in this enterprise can be summed up in the following quote: "At the heart of real work in prison are free market principles, in which the laws of supply and demand take precedence." [PE, p.38] Thus prisoners and their labour value are a mere commodity to be traded between prison governors and private companies and central to the model proposed in IJ is a new fifth prisons category, Category W, and a new matching higher ’super Enhanced’ or ’Worker’ IEP level. To be eligible to join this new elite, a prisoner would have to be drug-free, including being on any maintenance/drug substitution regimes [see Box 2], "having sufficient education to follow and understand instructions (reading age 11+) and be available for the foreseeable future" [PE, p.30] i.e. at least 2 years left to serve in prison. Unlike the proposal in BBB to initially operate from 2 Category C training prisons, with a possible expansion to the 9 remaining Category C training prisons, employing some of the 12,500 plus eligible long-term prisoners, [6] PE outlines the possibility of using up to 24% (17,000) of the sentenced prison population, expanding into the Category B estate and converting other prisons to Category C (Category W) status.

NMW vs. PMW

And what will any prisoners that have managed to jump through the requisite hoops and gained entrance into this elite cadre be paid? Well, PE proposes a new national wage rate, something it calls the Prison Minimum Wage (PMW), [7] which will be "less than the National Minimum Wage because it reflects the reduced living costs of those in prison" [PE, p.9] - a sort of reverse London weighting, except this form of financial inducement is obviously aimed not at the worker, making the prospect of taking a job more enticing, but at the employer, making the prospect of moving jobs into prisons much more enticing i.e. more profitable. So, having whittled away notional housing, food and transport costs (based on ONS Family Spending data) from the NMW, PE comes up with a figure of £3.10 per hour for this new PMW. But they don’t stop there, they also suggest that after tax and N.I., prisoners’ wages should be split equally between a ’management fee’ (paid to the prison), a victims’ fund ’donation’ or tax, payment into a ’resettlement fund’ and the remaining 25% would be the ’take home’ pay - which would work out to a princely sum of 70p, less than all other current prison jobs pay!

As further evidence of the authors' low regard for prisoners in general, and for potential Cat W workers in particular, IJ (unlike BBB) makes no reference whatsoever to the potential employment rights of these prisoners and it appears that the authors feel that Category W prisoners should be granted no such rights; after all "real work is ... a privilege". Indeed, the authors view the introduction of ’real work’ and the PMW "provides an opportunity to recalibrate and reform the IEPS so that it might achieve something more than rewarding bare compliance with rules", [PE, p.50] one that will miraculously "encourages more engagement and compliance" via competition amongst prisoners to attain the "privileged opportunity" of joining this new ’workers’ elite and one that will ultimately "transform prison regimes". Given the historically intractable problems endemic within the prison system, we recommend that they don’t hold their breath too long on this one.

Errors And Omissions

Although both of these reports were largely written before the arrival of the government's latest contribution to the 'Rehabilitation Revolution' ‘Making Prisons Work: Skills For Rehabilitation’, it is still surprising that neither addresses the central issue examined in that document: education and training provision. Given that ‘Making Prisons Work' highlights the fact that "[t]he skills and training available through offender learning will be crucial to enabling the difficult challenge of making an economic success of work in prisons" and that both HL and PE documents emphasise the paucity of the skills-base within the prisoner population, this omission is all the more confusing. True, PE does claim that "over time, driven by the use of payment-by-results and a clear focus on the thresholds for real work, improved outcomes from education and drug treatment inside prisons are possible and ... establishments must reform the commissioning and provision of healthcare and education to ensure that programmes paid for by the taxpayer are cost-effective" [PE, p.33] and that "management fee income would also serve as an incentive ... encouraging the provision of more effective and focused education and drug programmes" [PE, p.52], yet that hardly amounts to concrete policy suggestions of the sort needed to transform the prison skills base.

HL are even more remiss on this front, with the only mention of training being needed as that by governors "on how to tender for business and how best to foster an appealing atmosphere for real work within prison" [HL, p.6] However, the Howard League's most glaring omission is their wholesale abandonment of the social enterprise model that they pioneered in Barbed graphic design studio at HMP Coldingley. If "Barbed was enormously successful in ... pioneering a new form of prison employment", [8] why has the organisation abandoned this "path-breaking initiative [that] transformed individual lives and ways of thinking about prison work" in favour of more of the same sort of "uninspired, repetitive and poorly paid ... prison work that characterises modern incarceration", even assuming a NMW wage packet at the end of the week? Instead it has accepted that full-on capitalist exploitation, abandoning "the opportunity [for prisoners] to work productively and collectively to establish camaraderie based on mutual goals and end products" of such a co-operative enterprise for the 9 to 5 drudgery of the factory floor. But, as the BBB conclusion makes clear in its first lines: "Real work in prison is not charitable. It is not a project and it is not training. It is real work that creates wealth and makes a profit." [HL, p.41]

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

In addition to these often glaring omissions, there are some very strange and often basic errors, not least in the inexact use of terms by the IJ authors resulting in unnecessary confusion. [see the relevant Boxes] For example, the authors try to establish their credentials with the following straw man: "The total number of work places, approximately 24,000, is considerably higher than the frequently cited figure of 9,000 work places. This is because the 9,000 figure only covers those work places servicing the internal market or external contractors. The remainder of jobs are primarily jobs maintaining and servicing the prison (e.g. cleaning and catering work)", [PE, p.19] having already committed the same error themselves earlier on: "prison work places were 17% in 1995, fell to 13% in 2003 and have dropped to 11% today", [PE, p.6] (meaning "prison workshop place"). Other howlers include being unable to get the mane of HMP Lowdham Grange correct, even though the authors visited the prison, via inanities such as "the vast majority of prison work currently taking place is not real work in the sense that it is full-time, properly paid, and contract-based", [PE, p.18] [9] and the plainly stupid: "with most inmates working just 12 hours per week in non-commercial jobs that involve no payback to society" [10] all the way to the core solecistic argument, that "[e]mploying prisoners creates numerous ways for companies to make financial savings" such as minimal pay savings, reductions in capital expenditure, "using pre-existing prison infrastructure [to] reduce or eliminate a significant proportion of the usual capital expenditure normally incurred at the onset of a new business venture", etc., [HL, p.12] whilst at the same time arguing that "it is essential that prisoners receive a fair wage and prisons enterprises are therefore not in a position to undercut industry outside the prison walls." [HL, p.12] Both organisations are guilty of this self-deluding rationalisation of their positions, though the PE document clearly posits undercutting current external wage levels to a greater extent.

Clearly there is a tightrope here that the Prison Service will have to walk if it is not to end up merely offering private companies a much more profitable alternative to pursuing their businesses outside of the prison walls as has been intimated in the case of companies like Speedy Hire. [11] Other structural problem offering significant stumbling blocks to the introduction of ’real work’ into the prison environment include the changes that would need to be made to restrictive regulations such as Bulletin 8, extending the Core Week and doing away with the standard 2 hour prison lunchtime bang up so prison officers can eat their pot noodles and do the odd Sudoku puzzle after the prisoners have had their meal. However, there is one standout problem that neither organisation, despite their supposed extensive knowledge of prisons, and that is visiting times. Both make reference to ’visitation rights’ and the need for a set of minimum standards for them, amongst other things, and PE suggests that Category W prisoners should have the earned privilege of more visits, but neither organisation mentions when these visits would occur. Currently, prison visiting times are in the vast majority of cases during daytime working hours, with a few exceptions allowing early evening visits a few days a week. This is for two very practical reasons: 1) financial - the majority of prison officers work during daylight hours and it is therefore cheaper to have visits when they are around to search and supervise visitors; and 2) the vast majority of prison visitors have to travel large distance to get to often out of the way prisons that are poorly served by public transport, often accompanied by children, and therefore have to do so during the daytime. Therefore, unless a prisoner is willing to only exercise their visitation rights at the weekend, they will have to forgo the chance of ’real work’ as employers are not going to want workers who are constantly pulling a ’visitie’.

However, there is one outstanding issue however that both organisation appear to be totally blind: what happens to all the work currently carried out in the Category C estate workshops that the introduction of all these new exterior commercial contracts will displace? The smooth functioning of the prison estate relies on all the products for internal consumption, everything from boxer shorts and socks to cell doors and security gates via cell furniture, bedding and work wear; not to mention the financial stability of NOMS. [12] Where will all this work go? Certainly not to outside companies as that would prove prohibitive expensive and certainly not to other prisons as the workshops currently do not exist, even in mothballed form, and would again prove prohibitive expensive. Obviously they could continue to be carried out on the same production lines as those being transferred to use by private companies but this would almost certainly prove to be to disruptive and would definitely restrict the commercial viability of the whole business of introducing outside jobs into the prison environment. This appears to be a fundamental stumbling block to any plan for ’real work’ in prisons and, short of building new workshops to house all this ’real work’, which again would be prohibitive expensive, to which there appears to be no viable solution.

It’s The Market Stupid

So, what are we left with? We have a plan that appears to be based solely upon the idea of creating an elite of prison workers that can be hired out to the highest bidder, and whilst it is suggested that it would benefit the prisoners inducted into the Category W cadre, giving them experience of this hyped-up notion of ’real work’ and lip-service is even paid to the idea of in-prison employers taking on prisoners when released, much of the ’supporting evidence’ appear to be mere wIndow dressing for this core notion. This plan is based squarely on the notion that ’The Market’ remains the solution to everything, to the State's inability to run the functions that it is trusted with such as health provision and public security, including our prisons, (the only two areas that the Coalition have specifically excluded for 'marketisation' in forthcoming public sector competition legislation) and that it offers a solution both to the problems of financing the prison system and to the stratospheric reoffending rates amongst ex-prisoners (completely ignoring the fact that ’The Market’ creates the very social inequality that drives people into most forms of criminal activity in the first place c.f. the drugs economy and its pool of willing consumers, unemployed mothers driven to shoplifting to feed and clothe their children - the list is endless). "At the heart of real work in prison are free market principles, in which the laws of supply and demand take precedence" the ’Inside Job’ authors claim. Given that, just exactly how do they think ’The Market’ will be prevented from exploiting a patently subsidised employment opportunity, one that will clearly undercut existing external markets, and stop firms from transferring extant jobs into the prison environment to the loss of the current workforce? And pity the poor con who does decide to join the Category W cadre, having to work for two masters, both with divergent sets of needs that will inevitable be drawn into conflict, with the poor prisoner tugged in opposite directions and having to work out which side of his bread is the better butter is on - all for 70p an hour if Policy Exchange get their way (not that the deduction of the Howard League's victim tax from a NMW-based pay packet is anything to write home about).

In the end one is left wondering why, given that Policy Exchange have attempt to paint such an appalling picture of lazy drug-addled and generally feckless prisoners sleeping all day, except when they are either watching TV, playing video games or using the latest state of the art gym equipment, they are even bothering to try and engage with the idea of using prison labour at all.

References:

[1] Exactly how collaborative this project really was is a moot point as the 2 organisations even ended up conducting their own completely separate polls of the public as well as issuing separate reports.
[2] Including the Mail’s totally erroneous claim that "an astonishing 98 per cent of Britain’s prison population have been granted ’privileges’ supposedly reserved for better-behaved offenders." But why let the truth get in the way of a good story? Having said that Policy Exchange missed the role of the different IEP levels and how they operate. Fullfact.org put the Mail (and PE) right here.
[3] It should be noted that these 2 reports were not written as part of either organisations submissions to the ’Breaking the Cycle’ consultation process and as such did not contribute to the forming of the ’Making Prisons Work: Skills For Rehabilitation’ report published in May 2011.
[4] Whilst one does not know the exact terms this ’collaborative project’ was set up under, examining their respective references to this collaboration ("Policy Exchange would also like to thank the Howard League for Penal Reform for their initial input on this collaborative project and for sharing their direct experience of their own prison enterprise" [PE, p.4] and "Business Behind Bars is published by the Howard League as our contribution to this project" [HL, p.4]) and reading between the lines of the two reports, one is lead inexorably to the conclusion that the two organisations individual agendas have ultimately forced them to abandon any possibility of a joint outcome.
[5] "Prisoners typically have free access to gym and exercise equipment, for which law-abiding taxpayers must pay, and to other privileges such as in-cell televisions that are granted for a token sum that does not reflect their real value." [PE, p.18]
"At present prisoners pay £1 per week to have a television in their cell (the cost is shared for cells with more than one occupant) which compares extremely favourably to the cost of even a TV licence outside the prison wall (£2.79 per week) or for patients in NHS hospitals (up to £35 per week)." [PE, p.18] This completely ignores the fact that a) HMPS have no doubt negotiated a good deal on block licenses for its prisons, and b) the fact that previous governments have negotiated contracts with private companies to provide individual TVs for hospital patients to rent is hardly a stick with which to beat prisoners with. NB: Prison Service income from TV rental last year was £2,148,000, a not insignificant sum.
"Annual spending on gym and fitness equipment by NOMS has averaged £2.5 million in the last four years, with prisoners having free use of the gym and fitness equipment purchased. The average gym membership for the public is estimated at £41 per month." [PE, p.18] I doubt whether the authors have bothered canvassing any prison governors or screws on the idea of charging prisoners for use of the gym?
Both arguments are typical of a general anti-prisoner mentality and has much in common with the recent Aunt Sally-ish protests over compensation to prisoners who had suffered via the Prison Service failing in its duty of care - if prisoners are receiving a higher rate of compensation for injury compared to the wider public, then maybe compensation payment for the wider public should be increased?
"If anything, these privileges militate against the reform and rehabilitation of offenders, by providing them with free and easy access to activities that for many will be more attractive than learning to read and write, addressing addiction or working." [PE, p.50]
[6] NB. HL assume that only part of the Category C population will be involved in ’real work’ at any time, whereas PE foresee Category W prisoners concentrating in the Category C estate and apparently becoming the resident majority.
[7] Only to be paid to prisoners in ’real work’, non Category W prisoners continuing to be paid for purposeful activity at the current rates.
[8] ’Barbed: What Happened Next?’, Howard League, 2011.
[9] You tell that to all the world part-time and self-employed workers.
[10] From the press release announcing the publishing of ’Inside Job’. It should be noted that prisons could not be run without the ’non-commercial jobs’ that prisoners do to keep the prison infrastructure running from day to day and that if these cleaning, cooking, laundry, filing, etc. jobs were privatised, as have almost all similar jobs in the public sector, the costs of running the prison system would rocket. So much for "jobs that involve no payback to society"!
[11] According to the Scottish Post [article in 27 February 2011 edition], plant hire firm Speedy Hire, which operates from workshops in Erlestoke, Garth and Pentonville prisons in England as well as HMP Glenochil in Scotland, is using prisoners as an alternative cheap labour supply to repair and safety-check plant hire tools, replacing the 300 jobs lost when the firm closed 37 of its depots. [Online version behind a paywall but a version of the article is available here.]
[12] Listed here are some of the different types of work carried out for internal and external consumption at the 11 Category C Training prisons listed by HL as the most suitable to hose ’real work’.