Political expediency has resulted in controversy over an 11th hour intervention from Gordon Brown which resulted in the Prison Service Management Board (PSMB) having to withdraw a planned increase in prisoners' pay rates, the first since the Incentives & Earned Privileges Scheme (IEP) was introduced in 1995.

"An increase of £1.50 for each pay rate for a prisoner was agreed by senior officials and a Prison Service Instruction (PSI) was issued by Michael Spurr, the deputy director-general, on Monday. Under the instruction the minimum pay rate for an employed offender would rise from £4 a week [1] to £5.50 – a rate of £1.10 a day; the unemployed rate from £2.50 to £4 a week; short-term sickness rate from £2.50 to £4 a week; long-term sickness and retirement from £3.25 to £4.75; maternity leave from £3.25 to £4.75 a week." [2]

Needless to say the mainstream press headlined the idea that prisoners were due to receive an "astonishing 37 per cent pay increase." "15 TIMES the 2.5 per cent rate of inflation", screamed the Sun. [3] However, if they had just stopped and thought about it, they would have realised that this would have amounted to an increase on the basic rate of just under 2% a year over the 13 years since 1995, exactly in-line with the government's own current pay rise limit.

Minilv or Minitrue

The controversy started on Tuesday afternoon when No. 10 apparently spotted the relevant PSI and informed Gordon Brown. In a fit of Calvinist pique [4] he instructed officials to quietly withdraw the PSI. And we would have been none the wiser but for a BBC reporter trawling through the prison service website noticed it's removal and broken the news.

In what appears to be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, the Ministry of Justice claimed that ministers had not "approved" the increase, despite David Hanson, the Prisons Minister, being currently involved along side departmental officials in talks with the PSMB on the issue of improving incentives to work. This appears to refer to the current review entitled "Strategic Plan for Reducing Re-offending 2008-11". [5] If this is the case, then it raises a number of important questions.

If Hanson was involved in the discussions with the PSMB, why did he and his immediate superior Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, apparently know nothing about the issuing of the PSI? Why did the PSMB wait until 2 days before the increase was due to make it public? And why is the issue of prisoners pay or the IEP mentioned nowhere in this consultative paper? All very strange for a government that likes to boast of it's 'joined up thinking'.

Even David Blunkett, hardly the most liberal of Home Secretaries, thought that the pay rise was a good idea. "I should have increased prisoners pay ... Coming out at the end [or a prison sentence] with something and keeping in touch with their families, it helps to avoid their reoffending." [6] Not that the government would ever agree to pay rates across the board that would mean that prisoners could afford to save towards their release.

What about the IEP?

Both the Prime Minister and the Prisons Minister appear to display a startling lack of understanding of prisoner pay issues. Hanson claims that the pay increase interferes with his proposals for a "compact, balancing the opportunities we give to offenders to turn away from a life of crime with what the community is going to expect of them in return." Yet isn't that exactly what the IEP was meant to be when it was introduced in 1995? The IEP already links education, drugs testing and offender management schemes directly to rates of pay, as he claims that this 'compact' will also do.

In fact, if you do not participate actively in the regime accepting whatever work you are given, you get nothing and, as an "administrative measure" [punishment to you and me], your access to private money can be limited to the current minimum of £3.50 per week in addition to confinement to your cell or being placed on segregation [7]

Ulterior Motive?

Maybe there is some ulterior motive to all this? Could the proximity to the local elections be the reason? Surely it can't be that the controversy over the 10p tax rate is taking its toll on the government? According to the Times "It would also cost several million pounds across the Prison Service, and Mr Brown insisted that the money could be better spent elsewhere." [8] Maybe it will be used to replace some of the money that the government are now having to pay out in compensation to those who lost out when the 10p tax rate was axed?

Yet just this month a new "standard core week", which has reduced the average time spent out of cell each week by each inmate to its lowest level for nearly 40 years, has been introduction across the prison system. [9] Prisoners are now confined to their cells from Friday lunch time till Monday morning, except for a total of 2 1/2 hours for slopping out and meals. This was introduced by the government specifically to save £60M a year from prison budgets. And you can guarantee that that wont be ploughed back into education and welfare provision for the poor banged up cons.

An alternative view would be that so few prisoners are actually employed doing any form of meaningful work that it is in fact the increase in the unemployed rate (60%) that Gordon Brown was so concerned about. When you consider that the 80% of the current prison population that can work have only 10 000 workshop places available, and that the average nick can only manage to keep 20% of its population on administrative tasks, that's an awful lot unemployed prisoners. [10]

Too Cushy?

All this comes on top of what appears to be a blatant bit of union electioneering when Glyn Travis, assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, caused outrage by accusing prisoners at one prison of spurning the chance to escape because they and all other prisoners led such a “cushy” life inside with regular access to mobile phones and drugs. Ironically, this was on the same day that we learnt that the Prison Service had agreed, in an out of court settlement, to pay more than £120,000 to 15 former inmates at Leeds prison who had suffered beatings and racial discrimination by prison officers there. [11]

An interesting footnote to the 37% figure for the proposed increase in basic rate pay is that it mirrors exactly the figure for the increase in suicides in prisons in 2007 (the last year for which figures are available). [12] Many think that this is a direct result of the increase in the prison population and that the situation will only be exacerbated by prisoners having to spend yet more time banged up.

The Bottom Line

The basic problem is that prison itself does not work. Not even the most ardent of the "hang 'em flog 'em" brigade thinks that it does what it says on the box. If it really did, crime would have been a thing of the past long ago. And forcing the prisoners themselves to work doesn't either. In the past it meant sitting down all day sewing mail bags, that were then transported to another prison where the poor cons there then had to unpick said mail bags. At least that was an improvement on breaking rocks. Today things aren't actually that much different. Where work is available, it is by and large mind numbingly repetitive manual work designed merely to keep the prisoners busy for what is now only 32 hours a week.

It is time that the Prison Service either did away with the pretence that prison work holds any educative or training value at all and went back to sewing mail bags. Or do away with prison work completely and introduce a comprehensive skills training system offering the widest possible range of opportunities for prisoners that will be of some actual benefit to them at the end of their sentence.

In the end, even this will not do away with crime. We all know that the vast majority of white collar corporate crime goes undetected and it's only at the 'lower end', the unsuccessful working class criminals who can't afford to pay for their own legal representation or use their contacts to avoid prosecution, that get caught and sentenced to time inside.

The sad thing is that, even if the prison system were able to create a cohort of highly trained prisoners upon release, the jobs just wouldn't be there for them. And even if they were, societal prejudice would be against employing prisoners in them.

1. For what had been a 37.5 hour week until this month (April 08). See [9]
2. See:  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3842715.ece [possibly the ,most balanced and factually accurate piece of reporting in the mainstream media.]
3. See:  http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1107171.ece
4. guardian quote: "There have got to be rights. But there have also got to be responsibilities, and it's the responsibilities of prisoners that I'm interested in."
5. See:  http://noms.justice.gov.uk/news-publications-events/publications/consultations/RRSP_2008-2011/RRSP_2008-2011_eng?view=Binary
6. World At One 30-04-08. He also echoed the fact that it was poor decision making to allow the announcement the day before an important election.
7. The removal of earned privileges is specifically excluded under IEP rules but any prisoner or [truthful] screw will tell you "it happens".
8. See [3]
9. See:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/dec/13/prisonsandprobation.homeaffairs
10. This of course excludes those prisoners receiving some form of education course. But, as those are often for only a few hours a week and some prisons only have 10% of their population attending such courses, that takes not too many others out of the equation. NB. 20% of prisoners are on remand and unavailable for work.
11. See:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/25/law.ukcrime
12. See:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jan/02/conservatives.politics "Overcrowding blamed for 37% rise in suicides among inmates in 'failing' prison system"
There were 92 self-inflicted deaths in prison in 2007, 25 more than 2006. These figures breakdown as: 84 males and 8 females. 7 young offenders, 1 juvenile, 4 on indeterminate sentences, 18 other lifers, 23 foreign national prisoners. 90 occurred in public prisons and 2 in private run prisons.
"The suicide rate in prisons is almost 15 times higher than in the general population. In 2002 the rate was 143 per 100,000 compared to 9 per 100,000 in the general population."  http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/information/mental-health-overview/statistics/