13th December 2022
Again, here is the introduction to a thing about prisons I wrote at the Financial Times back in 2013:
Nine years later this unthinking or cruel general attitude toward prisons and prisoners remains as widely held as ever.
I blogged about the prisons issue recently, but today I saw a fascinating and informative post which should have the widest possible circulation.
The post is on the issue of payment for prisoners, and it is by Virginia Mantouvalou at the UK labour law blog.
Please click here and read it.
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The punishment of imprisonment, of course, should be imprisonment: that is, the deprivation of liberty.
But for many, it would seem that the imprisonment – the deprivation of liberty – is only the start.
Once the prisoner is inside the prison, the common view appears to be that the prisoner should be treated as badly as possible and that they must endure as brutal conditions as the State can get away with.
Any deviation from this extreme position is caricatured as being akin to prison being a “holiday camp”.
But, if the punishment is the imprisonment itself, there is – for example – no good or logical reason why prisoners should not be paid adequately for the labour they provide – especially for commercial enterprises utilising the available prison labour.
(Performing labour for inadequate or no payment, of course, has its own word.)
At the end of the linked post, Mantouvalou sets out what should happen:
“The leader of the UK prison officers’ union, Mark Fairhurst, said that prisoners should be paid the minimum wage for their workshop jobs.
“The Howard League for Penal Reform has made concrete recommendations on how to have ‘real work’ in prisons: they said that it is desirable for prisoners to work, proposed that it is acceptable for private employers to be involved, and emphasised that prisoners should receive real wages for their work, make national insurance contributions, contributions to a victims’ fund, and pay tax.
“The Guide to the European Prison Rules says that work must be useful, provide fair pay and include vocational training, that people should have some choice over the type of work, and that their working conditions (such as maximum hours and health and safety) should not be below those outside of prison. It also says that pre-trial, people can be permitted but not required to work, while after sentence, they may be required to work subject to fitness.
“These and other related recommendations need to be taken up and explored seriously.
“At a time of labour shortages and while there is a push to employ more working prisoners to cover these, keeping them trapped in structures of exploitation while in prison and setting them up to fail post-release is unjust.”
There can be no sensible objection to any of this.
But it will not happen – at least not yet.
And this is because too many people prefer to either be unthinking or cruel when it comes to anything to do with prisons and prisoners.
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I first visited a prison, (to see a client) in 1972. From that day onwards I have thought that the only people who believe that prisons are a holiday camp are those fortunate enough to have never set foot in one.
One summer I worked in the education dept of Wormwood Scrubs offering English and Art. The prisoners didn’t want English lessons and the Borstal Boys weren’t allowed any scissors, sharp pencils or sharpeners. The whole place was overwhelmingly depressing. On the way to the dept we walked the length of a workshop which contained long benches of Mickey Mice ready to be painted. That alone would stop me committing any crime.
An excellent reference to Dr Mantouvalou’s research and remarks.
Without wishing to detract from the equitable case for paying prisoners, I wonder whether similar principles apply to other groups who provide society with (almost) unpaid labour.
The UK has c.80,000 convicted prisoners. It also has c. 90,000 nursing students at some point in their (usually) 3 years of study, while c.105,000 people are studying to become teachers. The last two categories pay to study, and are regularly educated on the job, by way of placements for which they earn nothing. They can claim the most modest contribution to their transport costs, often paid after considerable delay.
As they say, ‘crime doesn’t pay’. Neither does nursing or teaching while studying. Those organising UK society prefer to have something for nothing.
I’m a member of a prison Independent Monitoring Board and spend days every month in a Cat C prison that is supposedly a “Training and Rehabilitation” prison.
Last Monday, the plumbing, plastering, bricklaying, motor mechanics, IT skills and warehousing workshops where the men can in theory earn City and Guilds qualifications were all closed because the prison has no instructors because the salaries on offer are much below the market rate. The Barbershop had an instructor but was closed because the prison decided it wasn’t worth assigning an officer for security because they’re not enough men in the workshops to justify it. The only training available was run by the Clink as an adjunct to the kitchens.
The men who should have been at the workshops were banged up.
I would much rather solve the problem of getting men out to purposeful activities before solving the problem of prisoner pay.
But then there’s the profit.
In a society that has the resources available to it to make literally wasting people an option, pointless rock smashing in a field of rubble could be seen as an appropriate disincentive to serious crime. Its effectiveness could be measured by offering capital punishment as an alternative.
In one like ours that’s stone broke ( sorry ), the challenge becomes identical to the one every big employer faces: How can the available labour best be converted into profit?
Sensible employers will try hard to provide a solid incentive for workers to cooperate in their money making scheme which – given fair pay and guaranteed work – might well make prison look like an attractive alternative to the reality of living outside it where nobody is obliged to make an effort to find a way to make your time productive.
Oops.
The root of the problem lies in the necessity of wasted lives that underpins our thinking as a society. It’s a real shame.
The trouble is I suspect is people don’t think about, and have no emotional comprehension of, what deprivation of liberty is.
I was recently in a police cell for 9 hours (don’t ask) – much nicer than a prison. Clean. No particular threat of violence. Provided with books to read. But absolutely horrific and traumatic – from a mere 9 hours.
The suffering of a multiyear sentence, just being stuck where a person has told you to be and unable to connect with anyone, is frankly beyond what I could see myself surviving.
Paying prisoners properly taxable wages is a brilliant idea!
I read The American Prison Business by Jessica Mitford (published in 1974) when I was about 18 and have never viewed prisons in the same light since.
I read elsewhere that a problem with our justice system is that it is based on the concept of ‘sin’.
And Google tells me that it was Dostoevsky who wrote “The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons”.
We fail prisoners with our prisons and it should be a cause of shame to all.
I agree. Their payment might then, in suitable cases, be paid as compensation to the criminal’s victim.
Recent publicity has drawn attention to the belated abolition of slavery, or indentured servitude, in some US states who have forced prisoners to work unpaid taking advantage of the 13th amendment of the US constitution, ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude but contained an exception for “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. This slavery contributes considerable profits to industries who use the labour.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loophole-unpaid-labor-in-prisons
The UK and USA both trumpet human rights for others but reserve the right to ignore them for their own populations when it suits.
“Fair pay for prisoners” might attract more support if subject to deductions for the costs of their food and accommodation, for maintenance payments they are due to make, for victim compensation, and for fines and court costs.
there’s sometimes talk of dutch prisons being like hotels, I remember years ago reading about someone being allowed to carry on running his business while in one, they have been closing theirs I think as not enough prisoners, and were taking them from norway or somewhere as I recall
Can we also to this the issue of votes for prisoners? (This seems to bafflingly still be an issue, despite those being detained by the Govt having an usually direct interest in who makes up the Govt.)
Until prison and prisoners are viewed as being a benefit to society and should therefore be properly funded for the work produced, this sorry state of affairs will continue.
A first step would be to enable prisoners to organise and negotiate the right to remuneration at a level that brings the authorities and prisoners the benefits of work.
The case of the prisoner paid a pittance for educating fellow prisoners quoted by Professor Mantouvalou is particularly depressing.
One often reads of magistrates and judges sentencing a person to so many hours of (unpaid) community service in conjunction with other penalties such as a fine and for example, loss of a driving license.
If you define unpaid forced work inside a prison as being morally wrong (slavery) then surely forced unpaid community service is the same?
As I set out in the post: if imprisonment is the punishment, then that is the punishment – the loss of liberty.
If community service is the punishment, then that is the punishment.
Imprisonment with free/hard labour has been abolished.
Anyone who has ever been grossly underpaid for their work – at any point in their employment history – will recognise how humiliating and demeaning this feels.
I have been searching, without success, for a list/database of companies operating in the UK who make use of prison labour – after reading this article, I do not wish to support them.
Does anyone know how I can find this information?
This organisation has some information:
https://iwoc.iww.org.uk/prison-labour/
and this article talks about companies profiting from low prison wages (although from 2009):
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/sep/09/prisoners-cheap-labour-major-companies
and this one from last year talks about companies desperate to use prison labour due to Covid / Brexit shortages
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/23/uk-food-firms-beg-ministers-to-let-them-use-prisoners-to-ease-labour-shortages
An excellent blog (as usual!) setting out a sensible proposal.
The idea that purely punishing people and keeping them cooped up with recurrent offenders (a.k.a. professional criminals) for 23 hours a day does not generate any income or improve outcomes is a negative one.
I would conflate it with a complementary positive theme.
As well as allowing people to earn money in prison, giving them purpose and the ability to build life skills for use on release, why not work positively to rehabilitate people so that they can have a much higher chance of being productive members of society on discharge, and a much lower reoffending rate? Pychologists tell us that carrots are more effective than sticks at bringing about change in behaviour (and yes you can beat people with carrots!). The Dutch experience provides evidence supporting this approach.*
Why not apply lessons learned by a country with one of the lowest incarceration rates in western Europe (Netherlands 53.9 per 100,000) to a country including two of the highest such (E&W 131.5, and Scotland 134.9)**?
Why sacrifice saving money and improving outcomes at the altar of populist ideology? Are we so scared of acknowledging our own dark side (which we all have, if only manifesting latently) that we have to ‘other’ those who, for whatever reason, have transgressed, by punishing them viciously? This is taking projection to an absurd degree.
A similar pragmatic argument can be made for the legalisation (& taxing) of many recreational drugs, as done in Portugal (Portugal drugs deaths 7.95 per million, 7th highest out of 40-odd European countries; UK 5th lowest at 74.7***), and although many might say that’s another argument for another day, the two overlap in both the people involved and the philosophical approach: follow the evidence, not the ideology.
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* https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/world/europe/netherlands-prisons-shortage.html
** https://www.statista.com/statistics/957501/incarceration-rate-in-europe/
*** http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/portugal-decriminalised-drugs-14-years-ago-and-now-hardly-anyone-dies-from-overdosing-10301780.html
In a weird confluence of waste, corruption, and exploitation, it is being reported that prisoners are being paid £3.50 per day (is that 50p per hour for seven hours?) to sort through the mountains of unsuitable PPE procured at great expense since 2020 and stored since then in shipping containers, to strip away the recyclable bits.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/prisoners-paid-350-day-dismantle-28759213