The latest brick in the edifice of the Coalition’s so-called ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ has been laid with the publication of the outcome of last year’s review of ‘offender’ learning in the guise of the ‘Making Prisons Work: Skills For Rehabilitation’ report. The basic outline of this ‘revolution’ was contained in last year’s Ministry of Justice Green Paper ‘Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders’: sentencing reform; better enforcement of non-custodial sentences; a greater involvement of victims and the public in the system; the rerouting of those with mental health and substance addiction problems away from the criminal justice system; increased scapegoating of so-called 'foreign national' prisoners; and a greater emphasis on rehabilitation. It is the latter area that this policy document seeks to address, complementing Ken Clarke’s desire to ensure prisons "become places of hard work and industry" [‘Breaking the Cycle', p.1], which will in turn indoctrinate prisoners with the correct work ethic that they can then carry out into their crime-free post-release lives.

An Education And Training Revolution?

For this project to succeed the Prison Service will need to radically increase both the quantity and the quality of its education and training provision, at the same time as it has to make a major contribution to the £4bn savings demanded from the MoJ budget. Unfortunately education and training provision in prisons is already suffering significant problems. For example, the Service’s major provider, The Manchester College, underbid on a series of new contracts with the Offender Learning and Skills Service. As a consequence it had to give up those in the South-East and North-East, lay-off 250 teaching staff (it would have been more had the Learning and Skills Council not made £1.9m available to cushion the cost of potential redundancies) and cut the pay and conditions of its remaining staff. Add to that the decrease in recent years in the numbers of private companies using prison labour (Contract Services) to manufacture and package their goods and the massive shortfall in the availability of the various behaviour modification courses that IPP (Indeterminate Public Protection sentence) prisoners, for example, must complete before they are considered for parole, and it begins to look like a very unstable foundation upon which to try and build a ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’.

Instead of recognising this, ‘Skills For Rehabilitation’ chooses to flag-up the “previous trebling of investment to the skills system inside prisons” [p.5] and the National Audit Office’s claim that “there was no evidence that the resources devoted to learning in individual prisons correlated to the levels of learning and skills needs there.” [p.6] Therefore what provision there is needs to be redistributed and “providers and prisons must be incentivised (sic) to achieve beneficial outcomes” [p.6] via payment by results schemes and “re-tender[ing of] the OLASS provider contracts”. [p.9] Improvements are also meant to accrue from: decentralisation (localism) via regional prison ‘clustering’; education and training provision to be targeted both towards the jobs available within prisons and towards local employment needs; partnerships (via training, apprenticeships and mentoring) with the local companies that wish to either provide the jobs in Clarke’s 'prisons as places of hard work' utopia or who want to provide them with post-release employment; prisoners to be made to pay for their own education, particularly at higher levels, via FE loans; and, the integration of prison careers provision with the National Careers Service, able to provide a prison-gates-to-the-grave service.

Questioning The Revolution

It all sounds very laudable and much of this is in fact orientated to producing a workforce more suited to attracting the sort of in-prison industries that Clarke craves to help subsidise the increasingly challenging size of his Ministry’s budget. [1] However the proposals laid out in this document raise many more questions than they answer. For example, clustering will only work if (a) prisoners are (unlike at present) able to remain in close proximity to the areas where they have close personal/family ties, (b) the cluster is large enough to include a good mix of different prison types and, more importantly, (c) there are sufficient local business to meet the needs of the project, with the South-West and East Anglia possibly having problems meeting the latter criteria. That said, clustering may be part of the solution to the endless churn of prisoners constantly being shipped around an overcrowded system a bed becomes free somewhere, leading to loss of contact with their families and being denied access to the strictly limited number of offender behaviour courses prisoners need to attend before being considered for parole. However this would only be the case with a concomitant decrease in the prison population and an increase in the availability of such courses. And that is just a few of the potential problems surrounding clustering.

Other areas of contention/omission that stand out (in no particular order):
● What form will the proposed redistribution of the education budget take? Will it only affect the three Rs and skills training provision or will it also include all the various CBT and psychology-based Offending Behaviour Programmes as well?
● Will education continue to operate under the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme?
● Currently participation in education is usually paid at a lower rate than working on Administrative Tasks or in prison workshops. If education remains under IEP, will the education pay rate change in line with the planned increase in pay for those working the 40-hour week (mirroring the minimum wage)? And if not, who will want to attend education/psychology courses (or work on Administrative Tasks if their pay rates also fail to be increased) when the current pay rate is so low?
● Will prisoners only be allowed to take skills learning/on the job training and work the 40-hour week once they have taken the all requisite drug/OBP/literacy and numeracy courses?
● What about the increasingly large elderly/infirmed and disabled prisoner population? What will happen to the short and long term sick pay rates and the unemployed rate, given that it will take decades (if ever) for the new ‘prisons as places of hard work and industry’ policy to be rolled out?
● The trialling of the ‘payment by results’ scheme [2] will have to run alongside training and employment schemes operating on the current payment model, in addition to the role of in-prison employers training their own prisoner-employees. Who will decide which prisoners get onto which course model? Selection bias obviously needs to be avoided in the ‘payment by results’ trialling process, but different employers will also have different priorities with regard to what type of prisoner they wish to take on, given that some will be more interested in a cheap in-prison workforce whilst others will be training up potential new post-sentence employees. Just as in the US, the former will want lifers who they can train up and retain as a stable captive workforce, one that isn’t unionised, doesn’t go on holiday or needs to receive sick pay; whereas the latter will want someone near the end of their sentence, who has taken all the requisite courses and has a good IEP record. Similarly, if education providers were allowed to select who they take on, they would obviously pick those most likely to succeed and therefore enhance their 'payment-by results' remuneration.
● No mention is made either of the long due and much needed increase in the Discharge Grant, which (like prisoners pay) has not changed since 1995; or of the problem of post-release accommodation for prisoners, many having lost their previous homes or suffered a relationship breakdown and have effectively been rendered homeless; or even of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and the problem of the disclosure of previous convictions to potential employers preventing prisoners taking up many forms of post-release employment.

What Price Employment?

The two key questions that stand out above all others however are how is the MoJ going to ensure that there are enough jobs for prisoners upon release when the current (and projected) unemployment rate is so high and who is (and this applies to the whole ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’, not just bridging the ‘skills gap’) going to pay for all of this? If the jobs are not there for people who have never spent a single day in prison or who have been in employment their entire working life but have suddenly found themselves made redundant in the current adverse economic climate to take up, where are they going to be found for this whole new tranche of previously unemployable workers? [3] And why are companies that have traditionally been pathologically averse to taking on someone with a criminal record, even when those convictions are spent, going to be persuaded to change their attitudes and ‘take the risk’ as they see it? [4] Additionally, contrary to what the report blandly suggests, self-employment will never be a realistic alternative employment route for prisoners (“in the creative arts and crafts” [p.19] or otherwise), and certainly not be one that would make any form of contribution significant enough to offset this all too obvious gap in job opportunities? [5]

As for the costs issue, obviously Ken Clarke, in line with the general Coalition modus operandi, believes that this will all be paid for out of the savings accrued from fewer people entering the criminal justice system. However, these saving cannot be made up front and some form of investment needs to occur before prisoner numbers can be cut. Yet the MoJ budget is being cut by 20% or £2.4bn, the equivalent of an entire year’s prisons budget, over the duration of this parliament. Much of that will come directly from said prisons budget, including potentially 20% of the workforce being made redundant, saving a nice chunk out of the overall MoJ wage bill. However the core problem remains, how is all this extra education and training going to be supervised with fewer prison officers, never mind all these additional workshop places that the wider ‘Prisons as Workshops’ idea will entail? The logic is simple: fewer screws means further cuts to the core week [6] and therefore prisoners spending longer banged up, with the inevitable knock-on effects on prison discipline, the exact opposite of the increase in ‘purposeful activity’ and concomitant decrease in offending behaviour envisaged under the plans outlined.

Following The Money

Saving money is indeed at the heart of this debate, whether that be the cost of re-offending, amounting to between £9.5 billion and £13 billion in 2007-08 according to the report, or shaving £2.4bn off the MoJ budget, and the unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from the proposed massive increase in training opportunities is, as suggested earlier, (see: [1]) that it is largely aimed at recouping the costs of imprisonment directly from the prisoners themselves by turning them more fully into a captive workforce. Additionally, it also looks as if the employment prospects of this new cohort of workers will sadly be limited to the sort of low-skill low-pay service sector jobs that Clarke’s Conservative colleagues constantly complain about having been filled by foreign workers as British workers are too lazy and feckless to bother applying for them. [7] Plus ça change.

Unfortunately, the central problem that all this well meaning rhetoric obscures is exactly the same disease that the previous New Labour government’s (and all previous governments’) criminal justice policies have suffered from: one cannot cure the problem by merely treating some of the more obvious symptoms. So we get statements like “Improving the skills of offenders, focused on the requirements of real jobs, is critical to reducing re-offending, alongside addressing other factors that drive crime such as substance misuse, mental health issues, poor accommodation, family issues and poverty” [p.10] that reveal the government's order of priorities alongside Cameron prattling on about ‘mending Broken Britain’. But Britain has always been broken; it is the nature of the beast and one cannot properly address the problem of disfunctional people in a society that is itself disfunctional. Problems cannot be solved in isolation and trying to address the problem of crime without directly addressing the causes of crime is bound to fail, just as Blair’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ [8] ended up being just more hollow rhetoric.

So, far from looking like the monument to a potential bright new crime-reduced future, the emerging structure of the ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ is beginning to resemble nothing so much as a rather rickety drystone wall, a flagship policy held together with little more than an admixture of the best of intentions and a rosy-tinted nostalgia for an era of hard-working Victorian prisons that never really existed and is built on the set of far from stable foundations outlined.

[1] To say that “[p]roviding the skills training needed for available work opportunities in prison will become a growing priority” [p.7] is more than a little disingenuous as the majority of the ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ project appears to be orientated towards making prisoners pay for their crimes by largely monetary means, with payment extracted for the skills and training they gain, either via the introduction of the Prisoners' Earnings Act 1996, deducting tax and N.I., 'victims fund' deductions and monies kept as a post-release 'good behaviour' surety, not to mention the use of Further Education loans for “high level training” [p.7], what ever that is.
[2] It is encouraging to see that the MoJ is apparently finally moving towards some form of evidence-based model in its policy making, even if the evidence base for this report is sadly lacking. The one attempt at such an input comes from a National Institute of Adult Continuing Education paper, 'Lifelong Learning and Crime: An Analysis of the Cost-effectiveness of In-prison Educational and Vocational Interventions' [IFLL Public Value Paper 2], which, as the report's own conclusion admits, is a meta-analysis based solely on US data that unfortunately suffers from the problems of being based on a relatively small number of studies, which in turn display large amounts of variability in the effect sizes they identified, some of which may be due to sample biases. Just a pity they haven't followed Ben Goldacre's advice and introduced properly i.e. scientifically based randomised trials.
[3] Structural unemployment of course is an essential feature of the Capitalist system, creating a pool of labour that helps drive down wages at the bottom end of the jobs market and ‘disciplines’ workers against organising under threat of loosing their jobs. And obviously many of these ‘previously unemployable workers’ were so even before they fell foul of the law and would no doubt continue to find alternative sources of income if they were to fail to find employment.
[4] A survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development showed that people with a criminal record are part of a ‘core jobless group’ that more than 60% of employers deliberately exclude when recruiting.
[5] Though the cynics amongst you might say that the average con is highly experienced in working as his or her own boss, just not pursuing any legal enterprises and certainly not any successful ones as they ended up getting caught!
[6] In 2007 as a money-saving exercise, the core week for prisoners was cut back to 32 hours with Friday afternoon work and education sessions cancelled, saving on staff costs.
[7] This is a highly unlikely scenario, with newly released prisoners replacing other workers in existing jobs. Much more likely is the situation where companies transfer jobs into prison workshops at the expense of workers outside of prison. Examples of this are already occurring. For example, see the entry for Speedy Hire in the companies lists or the news item here.
[8] New Labour ended up merely being tough on the ‘causers’ of crime.