Prisoners' Work and Vocational Training

Frances H. Simon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134756667
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Most prisoners in the UK are required to work. Yet prison work is a relatively neglected subject in the existing literature on imprisonment and few studies have focused on the nature of prison work, prisoners' experience of it, and the extent to which it meets the need of rehabilitating prisoners.
Prisoners' Work and Vocational Training sheds new light on this crucial area in the work of prisons and examines:
*the nature of training received by prisoners
*the actual work they undertake
*how this relates to the world or work outside
*the role it plays in helping to secure employment on release.
Frances Simon employs a balance of qualitative and quantitative data, including first hand accounts from UK prisons, gathered during field research. Her book will be essential reading for all those studying criminology and prison studies and all professionals working with prisoners, including probation officers and social workers.

1
Introduction

PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

Most prisoners serving sentences in British prisons are required to work. What kinds of work do they do, and why? How does prison work compare with ordinary work outside prison? What training do the prisoners get? What do they think of their work? Does it help them to serve their sentences, and does it help them to get employment when they are released, especially now when the world of work is changing?

This book is addressed to people interested in the criminal justice system, including practitioners and others, who have a general awareness of prisons but would like to know more about what goes on inside them. Although most prisoners have to work, prison work is a relatively neglected subject in the literature of imprisonment. Few studies have been made of the nature of prison work, the ways in which prisoners as individual people experience it, and the extent to which it meets their needs. This book, much of which is based on a study carried out for the Home Office by Brunel University, is intended as a contribution to public understanding.

We focus on matters affecting prisoners and ex-prisoners at a personal individual level, not on wider structural factors though some are mentioned in discussion. At appropriate points reference is made to findings from other studies. The Brunel research has much in common with one or another of them on various topics, but it also has some extras (as well as being more up to date). We give more attention than most other writers to describing and analysing prisoners’ own views of their work. We make direct comparisons between kinds of prison work and examples of their counterparts outside. Perhaps most significantly, our study includes a follow-up in which people who were first interviewed while working in prison were interviewed again after their release, to enable us to examine how far prison work and training affected their subsequent job chances. And we discuss our findings in the light of national economic and employment trends, to evaluate the usefulness to prisoners of prison work and training in the 1990s.

Our concern is with prisons in England and Wales, which contain approximately 85 per cent of all prisoners held at any one time in the UK and which are administered by the Prison Service (answering to the Home Secretary). Except for the historical section of this chapter and for parts of the book concerning the general prison population, we refer to adult prisoners, which in the prison system means those aged 21 and over and who comprise about 85 per cent of the total. And we focus on people confined under sentence. Prisoners on remand (or awaiting trial) are not required to work, and many have no work offered them in prison. Sentenced prisoners are approximately 75 per cent of the total.

This first chapter begins with a short historical survey of prison work from the eighteenth century onwards. It shows that over the years the purposes of prison work, as officially perceived, have been many and various, and the emphasis given to one or another has shifted back and forth with the changing currents of penal philosophy. The history helps to form a background for the research, because part of our project is to explore what the purposes of prison work should be. Following the history and coming to the present decade, we consider what the Woolf Report¹ said about work and how Prison Service policy has developed since then. We look at recent major changes affecting the Service, including the rising numbers of prisoners, tighter security, budget cuts and other matters which could influence inmates’ opportunities for work and training. Then we summarise the methods of the Brunel study, and the chapter closes by indicating the structure of the rest of the book.

A SHORT HISTORY OF PRISON WORK²

Prison work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Prisons, as establishments for the confinement and punishment of convicted offenders, developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the older institutions of the workhouse, the house of correction and the local jail. From the time of John Howard in the 1770s there was extensive and recurrent debate as to how the twin objectives of reformation and deterrence could be achieved. Howard and his fellow reformers, shocked by the squalor and idleness of the local jails, advocated a regime in which the chief elements would be solitary confinement (in clean conditions), religion and hard work. These three themes predominated in the prison system well into the nineteenth century, though the relative importance of work, its rationale and the forms it took, varied with time and place.

Howard believed that the prison cell should induce reflection and repentance, and that that process would be aided by the discipline of hard labour. The 1779 Penitentiary Act, which he helped to draft, envisaged work ‘of the hardest and most servile kind, in which Drudgery is chiefly required’, such as sawing stone, rasping wood or chopping rags. At Gloucester Penitentiary, built by G.O.Paul in 1784 as one of the first in a wave of new local prisons, the emphasis was more on solitary confinement with work given as a relief from it. Sounding a different note, Jeremy Bentham argued from 1791 that his ‘panopticon’ design for the ideal prison would not only provide surveillance but also enable the place to run as a profitable factory, turning its inmates into self-disciplined workers who would welcome work as ‘a cordial’. Though Bentham’s architectural ideas bore fruit in many of the new prisons which were built in the following decades, the government in 1810 finally rejected his panopticon on account of its exploitation of captive labour for private gain. In this they were much influenced by Paul’s view that a penitentiary was not a factory, and that a prisoner’s work should be a penance for sin.

During much of the nineteenth century the system continued to be a diverse mixture of establishments, but the central government was gradually gaining influence over local prisons and building big national ones (like Millbank Penitentiary which opened in 1816 with space for 1,000 inmates). The Gaols Act 1823 stated the principles which were intended to apply to all: the purposes of a prison were to keep prisoners in custody, preserve their health, improve their morals, and deliver the right amount of punishment to the convicted; this was to be done by ‘due Classification, Inspection, regular Labour and Employment, and Religious and Moral Instruction’, though the Act did not specify how. The great debate between the proponents of the ‘silent system’, in which prisoners worked together but were not allowed to communicate with one another, and the ‘separate system’ which kept them strictly apart working silently in their cells, was eventually resolved in favour of the latter, and culminated in the opening of Pentonville in 1842.

By this time, as a response to rising crime and increasing numbers of prisoners since the 1820s, prison regimes had become harsher. The treadwheel was common, as were the bread and water diet and the rule of silence. Ignatieff³ has graphically described a typical day in the life of a Pentonville inmate: twenty-three hours spent alone in his cell, eight and a half of them working at his cobbler’s bench or loom to make prisoners’ boots or cloth for their garments; one hour for chapel and exercise, all the time masked and separated from his fellows; a monotonous diet of bread, cocoa, gruel and stew; and for leisure, pacing his cell and reading the Bible. Indiscipline was punished by the lash or by confinement in a dark basement, and at night inmates could hear the screams of others unable to bear the solitude. Crawford, one of the first prisons inspectors, wrote in 1834 that work was a comfort to prevent insanity.

From 1848 public works prisons gradually replaced transportation, and offenders sentenced to penal servitude went to them after an initial period in solitary confinement. At these prisons most convicts worked mainly in association, and the work, while still hard labour under strict discipline, could be more varied and healthy. At Portland the prisoners quarried stone, built a breakwater and later mended roads and railways for the Admiralty. At Dartmoor they constructed buildings, they farmed and reclaimed land, and they worked in several manufacturing industries including clothing and footwear, hammocks and mailbags, as well as in domestic and maintenance tasks. Prison labour built Wormwood Scrubs. Du Cane, first chairman of the Prison Commissioners after 1877, wrote that the purposes of convict labour were deterrence, reform (by instilling good work habits and a knowledge of honest trades), and—fortunately accompanying the first two, he said—helping to make the prisons self-supporting.

However most prisoners, whose sentences were of weeks or months rather than years, served all their time in local prisons. In the 1860s the locals had between them a diversity of work: Ruggles-Brise⁴ describes how while some relied on the treadwheel and oakum picking, others were vigorously engaged in manufacturing, including the use of commercial travellers to sell the goods and the payment of incentives to both staff and prisoners depending on trade. But the Prison Act of 1865, following a crime wave and official views that prisons were too soft, led to increasing severity and emphasis on punishment, with religious reformation becoming less important. The 1877 Prison Act brought all prisons under central government control, and by the 1880s (when the prison population totalled about 18,000) the work being done by most prisoners was intended as mainly punitive and deterrent. First-class hard labour, to which nearly all male prisoners were put for at least the first month of their sentence, typically comprised the treadwheel or the crank. As the majority of sentences did not exceed one month, such labour would have been many prisoners’ only experience of prison work. Those serving longer in local prisons would eventually be given other work such as picking oakum, making mats or mailbags, sewing prison clothes, or domestic and maintenance tasks. Female prisoners were typically employed in picking oakum, knitting and needlework, or washing and mending clothes. Except for the treadwheel and the laundry, most work was done by the prisoner alone in his or her cell, for between nine and ten hours daily. Pay, in the form of a gratuity on discharge, was a maximum of ten shillings, which might be earned by a prisoner who had served at least six months.⁵

The Gladstone reforms and the new century

The oppressive prison conditions of late Victorian times were considerably ameliorated by the Gladstone Report of 1895,⁶ which led to change in many features including work. During the next two decades treadwheels were taken out and the spaces filled by workshops where prisoners worked together; staff were paid extra for instructing them, and some power machines were installed. Cranks were disposed of, and oakum picking gradually reduced (though it occupied a few prisoners till the 1930s). There was a drive to obtain industrial work, largely from other government departments, and in 1898 the Comptroller of Industries listed over thirty kinds of articles being made. From 1902 trade training was given to some young inmates of convict prisons and to lads at the new borstals, while at the local prisons inmates increasingly spent more of their working hours in association and fewer alone in their cells. However, the Gladstone Committee’s recommendation that a prisoner should be able to earn something continuously during sentence was not adopted, and by 1913 the gratuities had stopped, being replaced by a scheme of direct grants to discharged prisoners’ aid societies.

The Prison Commissioners’ views on the purposes of prison work at this time may be gauged from the following passage from their 1906–7 annual report:⁷

Every effort is made…to obtain means of employment, which shall not only be remunerative, but shall furnish in its execution the occasion of teaching some sort of industry to the prisoner which, if it may not directly conduce to his employment in that particular trade on discharge, will, at least, give him the habit of applied labour, the absence of which quality is the principal predisposing cause to a life of crime.

Sufficient work, however, was not always readily procured, and the majority of prisoners were thought capable of only simple tasks. Mailbag sewing was heavily relied on, especially for work in cells; in 1908 the Comptroller of Accounts and Stores, referring to the Post Office, said, ‘That great Department is, without doubt, our sheet anchor in the matter of prison employment.’⁸ World War I brought prisons plenty of work making war supplies, but from 1920 it was a different matter, and by 1931 there were not enough orders, even for mailbags, to keep all inmates occupied.

The 1932 inquiry

In 1932 a Departmental Committee was set up ‘to review the methods of employing prisoners and of assisting them to find employment on discharge, and to report what improvements are desirable and practicable’. Their report⁹ indicated a thoroughgoing inquiry. Though sympathising with the prison authorities’ difficulties in employing unskilled short-term inmates (‘this incompetent and changing crowd of workers’) they were firmly of the view that the primary aim of prison work should be the reformation of the prisoner: ‘In making our proposals we have borne in mind that the main object of prison employment should be, not the exploitation of prison labour so as to secure a return to the State, but the rehabilitation of the prisoner.’

The Committee pondered whether a prison sentence could be utilised to teach prisoners a trade they could use on discharge (‘a question which has been constantly put before us’) and concluded that this was practicable only for a small minority; for the rest, ‘the most that can be done is to provide work which will accustom a prisoner to habits of industry and to the speed which is required in outside employment’. They also considered whether, as many witnesses suggested, prisoners should be paid outside wages with deductions for board and the maintenance of dependants. They concluded that this was not practicable either, but they recommended a general scheme of wages for prisoners based on systematic work measurement as developed in outside industry. The thrust of the Committee’s recommendations was twofold: a drive to obtain more work, and the vigorous pursuit of industrial efficiency. Workshops should be overhauled and rationalised; work should be speeded up; instructors should be more numerous and better qualified; the larger prisons should have industrial managers, and so on. Over the next five years much of this was carried out. New workshops were put in, with modern power machines and safety equipment; all prison farms were given tractors; and by 1938 fewer than one-third of the prisoners employed in manufacturing were on mailbags (though this proportion rose again in subsequent years). Earnings schemes spread to many prisons, with average pay for piece-workers at about seven pence a week.¹⁰

World War II

The Second World War forced prison industries to make big changes, some of which held pointers to the future. The need for skilled workers stimulated training: Maidstone Prison, for example, pioneered a six months’ training course in engineering fitting for selected inmates, who on release were quickly placed in skilled jobs by the Ministry of Labour. Private employers become involved with prisons through the war effort: at rural prisons some inmates went out daily on bicycles to work for local farmers, who paid the prison authorities Agricultural Wages Board rates while the inmates received their usual prison pay. Other prisons, under similar financial arrangements, sub-contracted labour to employers making war supplies on government contracts, and the firms’ representatives supervised the work in prison workshops.

Prison reforms in the 1950s: treatment and training

Substantial changes in prisons followed the 1948 Criminal Jus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Six prisons
• 3: Pictures of prison work, and comparisons with outside
• 4: General features of prison work
• 5: Vocational training in prisons
• 6: Sink, float or swim: release from prison
• 7: The challenge ahead
• Appendix 1: Work instructors’ aims
• Appendix 2: Perceptions by prison staff and prisoners of the aims and purposes of prison work
• Appendix 3: Statistical analyses of the follow-up sample
• Notes and references
• Bibliography