by Pryce, Vicky
1 APRIL
After lunch we had a session with the lady governor and we were invited to watch a video sent by head office in which Michael Spurr, the current director general for prisons in the MoJ, outlined the new plans for the prison estate and the strategy for the future. I saw his face in the video but didn’t recognise him from my time in government even though we were both at the same level. Maybe he became a DG after I left. I was very keen to see what he would say. Because the meeting was held at the exact same time that Chelsea were playing Man United in the FA Cup quarter final, we switched the big TV on in the dining room opposite the pool room and Miss Carruthers, a senior officer, and I had to take it in turn to rush from the pool room into the dining room across the landing that separated them to check the score and then rush back again.
The DG was doing his best to present what was a further cut in budgets by using the usual civil service mantra of ‘doing more with less’ – I must admit I still don’t understand exactly how but everyone seems to outwardly believe that by just saying it you can convince people that you can do ‘more with less’. Try saying that to someone who has to feed a family and suddenly has less money to do so. We all wondered whether in fact that might simply mean fewer staff and more lock-up in prisons and less time therefore to be out doing other things. And the girls noted that the word ‘rehabilitation’ only made it once into his speech and women were not mentioned at all, and everyone worried what it all meant for open prisons as the video seemed to focus on closed prisons. But what impressed me was that the governor encouraged discussion which widened to include the culture in prisons, how to deal with bullying, the right attitude to staff if the girls felt put upon and many other areas. I felt that this attempt at inclusion was good. But there was still this uncertainty regarding the review that was coming up of the women’s estate and the governor was keen to ensure that we were all prepared for the review meeting that was coming up in May – later postponed to June.
By the end of the meeting Chelsea had won 1–0 and progressed to the semi-final. Blue is the colour – strangely I had brought not a single item of blue clothing with me to prison.
2 APRIL
My South American friend had come to find me the night before with a message from Debbie, one of the residents who lived in the workers’ area down on the ground-floor corridor. I had noticed her looking smart just before the 8 p.m. roll call eating late supper in the dining room along with other workers who were returning too late for the regular evening meal. Talking to Debbie I discovered that, like others, she worked during the week for Working Chance, the charity whose main aim it is to act as a recruitment consultancy for current and ex-offenders. Her chief executive wanted to get in touch and see how I could help. I, of course, agreed. So this morning I was called into the activities office to be told that they had an e-mail for me from Jocelyn Hillman from Working Chance explaining what they did and asking whether I wanted to be a patron of theirs and meet up as soon as I came out. The charity seemed to be very well known and in a few days’ time they were due to visit my old hunting grounds in Whitehall and were going, Debbie too, to the Treasury for a breakfast event with potential company supporters hosted by Nick Macpherson, the Treasury’s permanent secretary. I spent some time talking to the activities manager, who explained the links they had with Working Chance and the crucial role the company played in rehabilitation of offenders, and then tried to understand better from Debbie that evening what her work entailed.
It was obvious that getting women back to work was not an easy task. There is no doubt that carrying a conviction can have profoundly negative effects on someone’s ability to get a job on release. For women in particular who display the characteristics of low self-esteem and confidence and have a lot of educational gaps to fill, a daunting task in itself, it is a mammoth undertaking. As far as I can see, Working Chance is the only agency that focuses just on women offenders. Many of the permanent staff have come from other agencies and have strong views about the negative impact that imprisonment can have on women’s employment prospects.
I started talking to the ESP girls that afternoon about the issues facing women seeking employment while in prison and on their release. One rather bright lady in her forties, who had been a manager in a housing unit of a council before coming to prison and was in for fraud, told me that she had intended to go to the business enterprise course, which was highly rated by everyone in ESP and ran over seven weeks. Having always had a passion for jewellery she was thinking of starting a jewellery design business on leaving prison. One could imagine her distress when at her risk-assessment board on arrival at ESP, she was apparently told by a senior officer chairing the board that there was no point in thinking about going down that route as no one would be prepared to fund her because of her offence. My fellow resident was devastated.
After I was released I visited Working Chance. When I arrived, the staff were trying to coach a lady who had gone to prison on a highly publicised case, though not for long, and who had been able to secure interviews in the City on her release but was not getting the jobs. Working Chance believed that she had lost all her confidence as she was told by officers in prison that she had no chance of getting a job of the sort she had left and needed to lower her sights because of her conviction.
And indeed in an interview workshop I attended later the greatest worry the women all had was how to approach the issue of conviction and what to say if they were asked. Most had written a disclosure letter while in prison which was usually perceived to be quite inadequate but fortunately Working Chance had usually already dealt with that issue with the prospective employer when arranging the interview so the likelihood was that it wouldn’t come up during it and the girls wouldn’t have the embarrassment of having to answer the question. Interestingly disclosure in many types of jobs was not in fact obligatory. But Working Chance gave the example of an offender who had been tangentially involved in and then convicted of an armed robbery but after release didn’t tell her new employers because she wasn’t asked. She was a model employee but unfortunately for her there was an armed robbery in her place of work, the police were called and they checked on the backgrounds of all the employees who worked there and discovered her past. She was sacked on the spot on the grounds of gross misconduct even though she hadn’t been obliged to inform them of her conviction. Working Chance suggested therefore that the girls should not take any chances and always disclose their convictions in the future.
All this justifiably worries the girls. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that in the year following release, about half the year is spent claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, Incapacity Benefit or Employment Support Allowance. Overall, 49 per cent of ex-offenders were on benefits at the twelve-month point after release.91 What is particularly worrying is that this is in part related to a lack of good education and training programmes (which I discuss elsewhere), but more significantly related to the stigma attached to ex-offenders. In an investigation conducted by the charity Working Links, almost three quarters of employers said they would use a disclosed conviction to reject an applicant outright or would discriminate against them compared to an equally qualified candidate with no conviction. Only 20 per cent of employers (in their sample) have knowingly recruited an offender.92
The general belief that ex-offenders lack honesty and reliability is also unfounded, since the same investigation revealed that over 60 per cent of employers of ex-offenders found that they worked as hard, if not harder, than those with no convictions. This is supported by the fact that 97 per cent of offenders say they want to stop offending, and 68 per cent say the biggest factor in helping them to do so would be having a job.93 For women prisoners, employment is an even more significant issue. Only 33 per cent of women were in employment before entering prison, compared to 54 per cent of men.94 This is very nearly half the national employment rate for women.95 What is more, it is unclear how many of the 51 per cent not claiming benefits at
twelve months after release are in employment, and how many are reliant on partners or families.
The services provided by organisations like Working Chance, acting much like a recruitment agency but specifically for women released from prison, are vitally important. As well as training and mentoring, the charity liaises directly with employers, helping them develop appropriate policies, and deals with probation services to facilitate a transition into employment. They argue that this not only deals with financial problems experienced by unemployment, but helps instil a sense of pride and self-worth. This would concur with the arguments put forward by what is known as ‘Desistance Theory’, in which women are able to associate themselves with new and positive identities rather than the labels of ‘offender’ or ‘criminal’.
I looked at data provided for me by Working Chance. Of the women going through their programme into employment, 70 per cent are still in work six months after getting a paid job, with each earning an average of £17,425 per annum.96 Furthermore, there is only a 3 per cent reconviction rate for people using Working Chance services, and none of those crimes took place in the workplace.97 Although it could be argued that the people who ask to go through the charity to get jobs are a self-selecting group, committed to finding and keeping a job and therefore naturally less likely to want to reoffend, they are nevertheless disproving many of the myths about ex-offenders. It is obvious that having the right employability skills makes a big difference. Overall, the evidence suggests that in-prison education and vocational programmes bring a lifetime net saving to society of approximately £69,000 per offender (ranging somewhere between £10,500 at the low end, to a potential of £97,000 just for one person when victim’s costs are included). Even if such a measure were put in place for just half the women who enter prison in a year (approximately 6,500, who we can safely say will be released again within twelve months), this would generate a lifetime saving of £448.5m.98
The difficulty in getting any ex-offender facing prejudice back into work is compounded by girls having lost their self-belief and many in fact end up for years in low-paid, low-quality jobs which often provide them with little training to allow them to progress. Of course I generalise and there are many exceptions and some great companies around who make it clear that people with convictions should have the same opportunities as anyone else.
What is often forgotten is that in many cases, particularly for residents in open prisons as I have already described, people work on licence often on a daily basis commuting to jobs outside the prison and when they come out on tag in many cases they are encouraged to secure jobs as soon as they can. That way they cost the economy less and the offending and reoffending rates reduce markedly. And yet the negative perception remains. It would be useful here to bring the difficulties that these girls are facing into sharper focus by looking at the overall jobs market for women. Not only has the recession affected women more than men in terms of job losses, as women are disproportionately represented in the public sector workforce, which has been most affected by the cuts, but the difficulties faced in rejoining the labour force by women who leave for a while to start a family have recently been highlighted. In general they go back, if they do at all, to jobs that are well below their skills level and earn a lot less than before because they have lost their confidence and also because things have moved on – they are older, there is a new generation that makes decisions since they left and (with some small exceptions) they find it hard to get back to the senior positions they had before. Their confidence is shattered and even their language is affected – more baby talk rather than business talk. What is more, competition out there is intense. Imagine the extra difficulties when the interruption from the labour market is even longer. Advice given at a Mumsnet conference was apparently to go back to work part-time and take advantage of greater opportunities for working flexibility.
I agree with that – I had always advocated that there should be more part-time work at higher levels and more job sharing; though the public sector does offer the latter and it has been seen to work effectively in practice, it is still rare in businesses. The loss of women’s productive capacity as they are stuck in low-skilled jobs is obvious to me. Until shortly after the coalition came to power in 2010 I was director general and chief economist at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (previously the DTI) and while Labour had been in power had been appointed as the unfortunate senior official responsible for attempting to convince departments across Whitehall to think in terms of what their policies would do to productivity in the UK economy before enacting them. The lost productivity of women has always been a problem as many exit the workforce or quit well-paid full-time jobs for lower-paid, generally lower-level, part-time employment when they hit what they perceive to be the ‘glass ceiling’ and their chances of promotion become more limited. Skills are then lost, earnings remain below what they should otherwise have been and the economy and society suffer. This will be even more pronounced if one has spent a lot of time in prison, receiving little in terms of useful education and training, losing social skills and the ability to successfully interact with others, and therefore becoming effectively unemployable or confined permanently to less rewarding and less challenging work, even for those with high skills who would otherwise have had the potential to contribute positively to society and to the upkeep of their family. Permanently earning less than one’s potential means more need for public sector support and very little to show in return for a period in jail in terms of any discernible benefit to the community except of course the satisfaction of having someone punished, which is transitory and serves very little purpose, particularly when there are children involved.
The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (also known as the Bangkok Rules) and the Human Rights Act, which the Conservative Party have said they will abolish if they win the next election, both dictate that the courts should take dependent children into account when sentencing. The various pressure groups claim that this is rarely done and the evidence I collected while in ESP would seem to confirm that – I couldn’t check up what the girls were telling me, of course, so the conclusion from my sample may not be definitive but the only case I found where this was taken into account in halving the sentence of a female prisoner was because the mother was in the process of adopting a child from an unusual background and the social services which had worked so hard to get the child adopted feared that the whole thing would fall through. Sadly for the mother, who felt strongly that she was innocent of the charge that got her into prison, the adoption process also meant that thoughts of appealing against the sentence were abandoned as that would have prolonged or even scuppered the adoption process. It could also have led to hers and her husband’s first names, which was all the natural mother knew, being made public as the case re-emerged, increasing the chances of their identity being discovered and preventing the adoption from going through.
3 APRIL
A lovely Caribbean girl, Abi, asked me to help her with a question, as part of her course, on how to take account of environmental damage when conferences are organised. She wants eventually to go into event organising and this is a good way of getting there. I agreed to meet her in the morning but she didn’t show up. At lunchtime, since we were both working, we agreed to reschedule for 3 p.m. When she didn’t show up again I went looking for her and found her asleep in her room! We rescheduled and finally met in IT before they closed down at 8. Well, eventually she got through the course with a good mark and I hear she has been hired by some event organisers in London. Maybe if all else fails when I get out I will ask her for a job.
As it happens I spent the late afternoon with Lesley, who managed the Vision office in ESP (the link between the residents and the outside education and employment worlds), discussing employment issues and what options there were for women in general to prepare for work on the outside again. She thought that in my case and
on account of my specialism there was no point in thinking of anything other than using my specialism to good effect, which was oddly reassuring in a way. We discussed teaching, too, and she gave me some brochures and further information.
4 APRIL
During supper we sat with Kirsty, a twenty-year-old newly converted Muslim and vegetarian with a heart of gold, who was in prison for the fourth time. She insisted that this time around she’d done nothing wrong except protect her sister. They had been on a night out when two Pakistani men had tried, she said, to pull her sister into a car masquerading as a taxi. Both she and her sister, who had never before been in front of the courts, were charged and convicted with grievous bodily harm and attempted robbery. Kirsty claimed that they were only trying to protect themselves but that her previous brushes with the law hadn’t helped.
The good thing is that this latest episode in prison seems to have taught her that she needs to stop getting into trouble. Due to be released in a couple of weeks, she has a job lined up with a supermarket at just over minimum wage, which she intends to keep. And in the meantime, despite her streetwise behaviour, she is known as the governor’s pet, who uses her openly to find out what girls think about various aspects of the prison regime – not a bad thing at all as it does her confidence a lot of good and she tells it straight. We all love her directness.
