The government wants prisoners to be more productive, before their release as well as after it

IN A hangar at Ranby prison in Nottinghamshire, an inmate is putting reflectors into bulkhead lights for Applied Security Design, a private firm. His pay is a pittance: £7 ($10.70) a week. But he is glad to have the job. “It’s better than sitting in your cell all the time,” he says. “It makes you feel better about yourself.”

In a second workshop prisoners are making furniture for the government and for Amaryllis, another private company. Here, the emphasis is on getting vocational qualifications as well as on the products. A lifer has graduated from dovecotes to dolls’ houses, and hopes to convert his own garage into a workshop when he eventually gets out, as many supposed “lifers” do.

Turning Britain’s prisons into what the coalition government calls “industrious places of productive work” lies at the heart of its plans for penal reform. Work behind bars isn’t new. Like those in many other countries, British prisoners have long been expected to perform chores such as cooking and gardening. From time to time, amid bursts of enthusiasm for prison industries, the authorities have tried to put them on a commercial footing. But overcrowding and outdated facilities have hampered serious work programmes. Only around 10,000 of the 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales are currently employed in industrial workshops. The government wants to double that figure in a decade, and extend working hours from an average of a little over 20 a week to 40. And it aims to lure more private outfits into prisons to set up and run units themselves.

Two factors have persuaded the coalition to embrace prison industries now. The first is stubbornly high reoffending rates, especially among the many ex-cons who are unemployed. According to a survey by the Ministry of Justice, almost three-quarters of prisoners who fail to find jobs and accommodation on release are reconvicted within a year—compared with only two-fifths of those who do. Yet less than 40% of offenders manage to find work after completing custodial or community sentences. Holding down a job inside, in something approaching a real-world workplace, learning good work habits and emerging with an employer’s reference, would make that transition easier, the thinking goes.

Captive markets

The second, related spur is financial. The prison budget is being cut dramatically, mainly by reducing staff and putting administration out to competitive tender. The squeeze makes addressing expensive recidivism an urgent priority. In theory prison industries could turn a modest profit—even if, at the moment, many actually burden the taxpayer, mainly because of the extra security involved. Prisoners’ wages are already docked to provide support for victims of crime; the hope is that more productive employment will boost those contributions, too.

Ranby is one place that needs little encouragement. With almost 1,100 inmates it is one of the biggest “Category C” (moderate-security) male prisons. Under its newish governor, Neil Richards, it is keenly embracing the government’s agenda.

Of its 14 workshops, one already operates around the clock, producing chair parts and light fittings as well as cutlery and plates for the prison service. Ranby plans to upgrade its laundry facilities; it has secured a share of one outside contract and is looking for more. Some 280-300 prisoners are employed full-time in the workshops now. Another 100 will find work in the laundry and 20, to start with, in a new manufacturing venture. Mr Richards hopes to get 500 prisoners working full-time by 2015.

What can Ranby, and other prisons with similar ambitions, offer employers? Its workforce won’t strike and may be less likely to pinch materials. It has plenty of space and some costly machinery already installed. Businesses, for their part, are chary of saying just what they pay to produce in prisons (though the inmates earn little, companies pay a bigger sum to the institution for the space, utilities and security); but the costs are unlikely to be higher than they are for labour at liberty.

True, adapting the prison regime to the demands of commerce can be tricky. Prisons’ main job is holding people securely—but businesses need employees to be available for a normal working week, and to respond flexibly to demand. At Ranby, Mr Richards is trying to oblige, with brief lunchtime breaks in the workplace itself. Firms may also need access for lorries at odd times of the day or night; separate entrances for business traffic might help, too. “Combining security with full-time commercial working is a challenge,” says Paul McDowell, a former governor of Coldingley prison and now head of Nacro, a charity that works with offenders, “but it can definitely be done.”

For some employers, hiring offenders is a moral mission, or a way to demonstrate social responsibility. Timpson, a family-owned shoe-repair chain, runs three training academies and three workshops in prisons, and employs prisoners allowed out during the day on temporary licence. Many are offered permanent jobs after they have served their sentences. The alternative labour pool can also help ease skill shortages. Network Rail, for example, provides long-term jobs to inmates, whom it trains in prison to lay railway tracks.

Evidence from the field supports the government’s finding that jobs help prevent reoffending. National Grid, a power company, leads a scheme involving around 80 firms, which trains offenders allowed out on temporary licence during the final year of their sentence, and employs them on their release. Mary Harris, who runs it, thinks around 2,000 prisoners have been helped over ten years, and that the reconviction rate among those who complete the programme is about 6%.

Not everyone shares the government’s zeal, however. Inmates toil for piddling rates, often at jobs that offer little stimulation or chance for advancement; a protesting group of current and former prisoners calls itself the Campaign Against Prison Slavery. The name echoes criticisms of some such programmes in America, where the use of prisoners to work on farms or make clothing is often decried as exploitative and ineffective.

Giving paid work to offenders when some of the law-abiding jobless are looking for it also raises hackles. Employers and officials insist, not entirely convincingly, that they look only to commission work that would otherwise have been done abroad, or by machines.

Andrew Neilson of the Howard League for Penal Reform, a pressure group that set up a prison industry at Coldingley in 2005 which has since closed, thinks the scheme should be more radical. Businesses should be given far more control over the workplace behind bars. Prisoners should sign contracts, get the minimum wage, pay taxes and enjoy employment rights as far as possible. This would prepare them better for life on the outside, he thinks.

No one knows how far the government will go. But several recent prison privatisations have been aimed in part at encouraging work inside. And the coalition has been more radical in criminal-justice matters than in almost any other. There is no reason to think it will stop here.

CORRECTION: this article originally stated that Railtrack tries to provide jobs for former prisoners. In fact this laudable scheme is run by Network Rail. Sorry.