If you are nicked and sentenced and find yourself detained at Her Madge's Convenience, there is a chance that you will be offered work [where available] for a pittance as an alternative to being banged up all day. This can take one of two forms. Either you are involved in the day to day maintenance of the prison itself - cleaning floors, picking up litter, working in the laundry or kitchens. Or prisoners can be offered the dubious privilege of a place in the workshops and, even in a few places, on the prison farm.

In England and Wales the administration of this is in the hands of individual prison governors. They can negotiate contracts with outside firms who want products produced in prison workshops - your double-glazing made at HMP Wolds and Blakenhurst or your electrical components assembled at HMP Lewes and Bedford. Governors can also set local variations in the basic rates of prisoner wages paid under the Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) scheme. Under this scheme, prisoners can do a full week's work and be paid as little as £4.00 [the basic minimum wage], though the current national average is around £9.60 for a 32 hour week.

SPS Industries

In Scotland however things are run differently. Prison labour is under the centralised control of Scottish Prison Services (SPS) Industries. Run from their HQ at Calton House in Edinburgh and the Central Stores at Faulhouse, near Bathgate in West Lothian, SPS Industries has a budget of around £2.50m and employs just over 20 people.

In 2002-03 SPS Industries had a very successful year. The SPS annual report trumpeted the fact that "over a million pounds worth of work previously carried out abroad being won for the Scottish Prison Service Workshops." Income from SPS Industries' sales was at an all time high of £2.99m, from total sale value from production of £5.42m. In the same report, under the slogan Leaders In Prison Correctional Work, they also told us that " The Royal Mail awarded SPS Industries their Gold Award for outstanding achievement in supply of metal fabricated postal trolleys." All this was illustrated in a series of pie charts and histograms in a colourful appendix. Heady days indeed.

By 2005-06 the appendix was no longer a feature of the annual report and annual income from sales had fallen to £1.77m. SPS Industries were no longer featuring as a
success story and the following year, the last for which figures are available, income from sales had fallen to just £1.13m.

During that period SPS Industries has lost a number of high profile clients due to a combination of factors. One of these is the bad publicity generated by the Campaign Against Prison Slavery (CAPS), an organisation that campaigns against IEP and for the right of prisoners to gain meaningful training and educational opportunities within prisons, and their website naming and shaming companies that exploit prison labour. This naming and shaming internal SPS sources tell us led to Gleneagles Hotel pulling out of their contract with SPS Industries for the manufacture of their laundry bags within weeks of being named the website's "Company Of The Month". Gleneagles of course deny this and say that it's simply because they had found somewhere cheaper.

The other main cause is the actions of the prisoners themselves in resisting this exploitation by throwing a clog in the works: packed items missing a component, bed frames that mysteriously collapse because someone forgot to put a bolt in the correct place. All exploited workers know of ways they can silently fight back.

Crisis, What Crisis?

In addition to the collapse in sales and loss of contracts, now even the staff at SPS Industries are beginning to abandon what they perceive is a sinking ship. At the beginning of February this year CAPS learnt that Tony Simpson, head of SPS Industries, had had enough of the bad publicity and pressure to improve sales. He was leaving to head the new PPP prison at Addiewell, West Lothian. No sooner had CAPS discovered that Nigel Ironside, governor of HMP Dumfries, would replace him than our sources told us that he had had second thoughts and is now reluctant to take up his new post. Other staff members, including a storeman and a member of the sales staff at Fauldhouse have also left their posts within the last month.

On top of this, Paula Arnold, deputy head of SPS Industries, is leaving her post and will instead be conducting a review of SPS Industries itself. This, we understand, is with a view to some form of restructuring, probably including the selling off the Central Sores at Fauldhouse, and will also seek to find out why sales figures have plummeted in recent years.

We at CAPS of course welcome this review. It offers an unmissable opportunity to change the whole ethos of prison work and training. Instead of the present situation: very limited training in workshops that follow production line principles, producing items for contracts with outside firms or, in the case of SPS Industries' line of Athol garden furniture, stock for wholesale to gardening centres; prisoners could be offered an integrated system of training and education addressing the very real needs of the prisoners rather than the prison industries' need to produce a profit. This integrated system would obviously need to include programmes to address the literacy and numeracy skills that the majority of prisoners lack.

One possible model for change within the workshop system of SPS Industries is that followed by the Barbed design company operating out of HMP Coldingley. This project was set up by the Howard League for Penal Reform as a social enterprise. It has trained and employs 9 inmates paid at minimum wage rates rather than the paltry rates paid to other prisoners. The workers even pay tax and NI contributions and are able to save towards their eventual release and contribute to a collective fund that donates to victim's charities. The project also employs a highly skilled studio manager but there are no directors exploiting a captive workforce to build their own private fortunes or shareholders to have pay dividends to. Instead all the profits go back into the project. Barbed is unique within the prison system but offers an innovative and controversial alternative to the traditional model pursued by the prison industry.

Some Facts

"Thirty per cent of offenders were regular truants from school. Almost half of all male prisoners were excluded from school. Over half of prisoners have no qualifications at all, and more than half of all prisoners are below the level expected of an average 11 year-old in reading, writing and maths." This is a quote from Neil Bentley, the Director of the CBI Public Services Directorate in a speech titled ‘The Business Of Reducing Reoffending’ to a HM Prison Service Industries Forum in 2006. He also went on to point out that at present:
• 76 per cent of offenders leave prison without a job
• more than 50 per cent of people on probation are unemployed.
• according to the Home Office, lack of ‘education, training and employment’ is the single greatest factor behind offending
• this exceeds all other factors, including housing, relationships, drug and alcohol abuse
• offenders released from prison without a job are twice as likely to re-offend as those released with employment already lined up.

Clearly, by these figures the present prison regimes in England and Scotland are failing. Yet what does both the present government and the Tories want to do? Increase investment in the prison system by building more prisons and increase the rate of privatisation of the present prison stock to cope with the ever-rising prisoner numbers.

This is plain stupid. The money should be going into efforts to decrease offending rates. And the only way to do this is by tackling the training of prisoners and the provision of employment for ex-offenders. The review of SPS Industries could just be the ideal opportunity to turn the thinking of the prison industry on its head.

The Campaign Against Prison Slavery

Something else that could come out of the impending review might be some answers to questions that CAPS have been asking under the Freedom Of Information (FOI) Act but have so far failed to gain satisfactory answers to.

In early 2007, CAPS was informed by SPS insiders that a major contract between SPS Industries and Airsprung Beds had been misnegotiated and that SPS Industries were making a large loss on it. This flagship contract was for the supply of platform bed frames and divan bed bases, made at HMP Shotts, to Airsprung, a Wiltshire company that supplies finished beds to Argos, Bensons & The Bed Shed amongst others. Airsprung Beds supplies the raw materials [wood and metal fixings] and ships it up to Shotts.

The prisoners make the frames and an outside contractor than transports the palletised frames to the Fauldhouse depot 10km away. Airsprung lorries then transport them down to their Wiltshire factory.

For each bed frame or divan base SPS Industries earns between £2.15 and £4.30, depending on the model. Now the average lorry load from Shotts to Faulhouse should cost about £160 for 100 bed frames i.e. £1.60 per frame, but our sources tell us that the contract only allows for transport costs of 30p per frame! Something somewhere does not add up.

CAPS, through a number of FOI applications, have sought to clear up this discrepancy but to no avail. Scottish Prison Services claim that the 'official' costs "are subject to 'the public interest test'" and as such will not be disclosed in response to out FOI Act requests because "this information may have a detrimental commercial impact on the company." Additionally, they tell us that for them to calculate the actual transport costs for a single bed would cost more than the Act's statutory cut off figure of £600, beyond which an organisation can refuse to pursue a FOI request.

This is clearly a very curious situation. Any commercial company worth it's salt will keep a very close eye on the on-going running costs of any contract that it negotiates to ensure that said contract remains viable. In fact, SPS Industries carry out quarterly ‘contract reviews' examining material and transport costs the profitability of all their lines except, we are again told by internal sources, the Airsprung Beds contract. We have since referred this to the Scottish Information Commissioner.

If our information is correct, this would mean that the Scottish tax payer has effectively been subsidising a private company to the tune of tens of thousands a year and that efforts have been made to cover this fact up. Now, we can only go on the information supplied to us in confidence the SPS insiders and the more than grudging responses that have come from SPS Industries itself. We could of course be totally wrong but all the evidence we have seen so far points to just such a scenario.