Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
TUESDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2003
MS ANNE
OWERS, MS
UNA PADEL
AND PROFESSOR
ANDREW COYLE
Q180 Miss Widdecombe: I did see a
Swiss prison which I thought was particularly good in this respect,
I cannot say that it is typical and that is why I was wanting
your input on it. Could you just comment on the involvement of
the private sector in delivering work into prisons? An awful lot
of prison work is actually done, particularly in Coldingley for
example, in producing material for consumption by the Prison Service
for obvious reasons, but what about what I might call real work,
can you talk about any particular examples you have seen of that
and where it works well?
Ms Owers: I have seen some good
examples. Again the word patchy keeps on cropping up in our evidence
and it will crop up in this contribution as well. You can look
at the work that is being done within Aylesbury Prison where Toyota
were persuaded by a particularly charismatic instructor to invest
in a state of the art motor mechanics workshop within the prison
where young men are being trained and being given the skills which
are valuable skills in any Toyota workshop or factory, anywhere
and are often being taken on in employment before even they leave
the prison. That is a model that I think combines with the corporate
social responsibility that many companies are now striving to
get involved in.
Q181 Miss Widdecombe: Where was that?
Ms Owers: In Aylesbury. There
is a similar project with Transco, the gas company, in Reading
Prison, again offering real skills and often providing employment
before people have even left the prison.
Q182 Miss Widdecombe: Is Reading
not a local prison?
Ms Owers: No, it is a young offender
institution.
Q183 Miss Widdecombe: And Aylesbury?
Ms Owers: Aylesbury is also a
YOI.
Q184 Miss Widdecombe: Can you give
us any adult prison where that is the case?
Ms Owers: I understand that there
is something happening in Hull Prison but I could find out more
about that. I cannot think immediately of any examples but I am
sure they exist. I will have a look.
Q185 Miss Widdecombe: When you think
we have a prison estate of 138 prisons and you cannot think immediately—and
this is not a criticism of you—of any examples in the adult
estate, that is a pretty severe indictment, is it not?
Ms Owers: It may simply be that
my memory is not working very well.
Q186 Miss Widdecombe: I do not think
so.
Ms Owers: I will certainly have
a look through recent reports and see if there is anything of
importance that I can dig out.
Q187 Miss Widdecombe: Would you agree
that if you actually lock people up for anything up to 20 hours
a day and a couple of years later you open up the gates and say
"Go and lead a law abiding life" that it is cloud-cuckoo-land?
Ms Owers: Prison is never a neutral
experience. If you want it to be something that is beneficial
then absolutely, particularly with young men, you have to provide
them with something purposeful to do.
Q188 Miss Widdecombe: It might be
a worthwhile investment to try and make my vision happen if not
by the middle of next week then at least within the foresee future.
Professor Coyle, can I take you on a slightly different path for
a moment. You refer in your written evidence to the Restorative
Prison project. Can you just comment a little on that and its
impact please?
Professor Coyle: I think the success
has been the involvement of the local community first of all through
the local council. The hook of the project was the refurbishment
work done in a park which actually was symbolic of the regeneration
of the community and what we were able to do was to involve prisoners
in this symbolic regeneration of the community. Suddenly Middlesbrough
Council discovered it had a prison in its midst, because the prison
up there was not called Middlesbrough Prison, it was called Holme
House Prison and no one knew where that was. Most of the prisoners
there come from Teesside and most of them are going to return
to Teesside. So the success was getting the local authority, particularly
led by their mayor, Mayor Ray Mallon, involved in this, getting
unusual departments in the council involved such as the Development
and Urban Regeneration Department which we discovered was also
responsible for housing and they then discovered that prisoners
were coming out of Middlesbrough without accommodation and they
said, "But we have got vacant accommodation. It's not the
best but it can be made available." These things came together.
As very often happens in prison issues, those involved became
enthusiastic and the officials and others from Middlesbrough Council
went and began to spread that work through the Local Government
Association, through SOLACE and other bodies. The success in a
word has been to move outside the criminal justice system into
the mainstream.
Q189 Bob Russell: Is education and
skills provision a genuine priority of the Prison Service, Professor
Coyle?
Professor Coyle: Is it currently
a priority?
Q190 Bob Russell: Or going back to
a time when you were active, was it a priority?
Professor Coyle: As far as I am
aware the English Prison Service gives a priority to education.
The delivery of education historically has been a good model to
follow. In many of the prison activities the prison system has
not used the community resources but set up parallel structures.
It did not do that in education because historically what it did
was it contracted to local further education colleges or community
colleges to deliver in a prison. It then went off slightly at
a tangent when it contracted out. I think it is now coming back
and it is giving a priority to education. Where there is a debate
going on is in what is meant by education, because there was a
period when people focused very narrowly on reading, writing and
arithmetic and it was thought that if we could just give prisoners
these skills then it would make them employable. There is some
value to this argument and that needs to be dealt with. I think
there is also an argument for widening and more creative experiences
so that the prisoners do not simply have destructive experiences
but they have creative experiences where they are actually being
stretched. I am thinking particularly of when I was governor at
Brixton when we had the Royal National Theatre help us to do a
six week workshop and the prisoners did a performance of Hamlet
and you may think how inappropriate for a prison. What that actually
did is it forced them to learn their lines, it forced them to
work together as a team and at the end of it all there was an
outcome where they presented to their families and to other prisoners.
That was a real benefit.
Q191 Bob Russell: Whether it is Hamlet
or just basic writing and maths and all the rest of it, that cannot
be done, can it, if they are locked up for 23 hours out of 24?
How much of a priority is education skills provision? Has performance
in this area improved significantly following the ring-fencing
of funding?
Professor Coyle: The Chief Inspector
is probably better placed to comment on that. The Prison Service,
particularly given its experience in the mid-1990s, has been quite
clear that its priority has been to prevent prisoners escaping
and to have secure and well ordered prisons and it has succeeded
in that remarkably well. There has been a price paid in all the
other activities, whether they are called purposeful activities
or education or whatever. I think the Prison Service is now trying
to break out of that. I think at some point your Committee might
want to pay attention as to whether prisons are organised for
the benefit of staff or whether they are organised for the benefit
of prisoners, and there is a big issue about the distribution
of staff and the distribution of staff time in that if there are
three officers on a landing then the 40 prisoners in that landing
can be out doing purposeful things; if there are only two officers,
if one is off sick then no one gets out. Those issues need to
be tackled a bit more enthusiastically by the Prison Service.
Q192 Bob Russell: Hamlet was a roaring
success in one prison. Do you support the role for the arts in
prison and what benefits do arts activities provide to prisoners
that basic education initiatives cannot?
Ms Owers: Yes, I do very much
support that. I think when you are dealing with people who have
often spent their lives either avoiding or being avoided by education
you may need to be quite clever about the way that you introduce
them to the skills they need to acquire. It is very helpful that
increasingly prisons are being more flexible about that and are
introducing basic skills in the context of the workplace for example.
Where you have young men of just over 18, above the school leaving
age, you are going to have to overcome considerable resistance
before any learning starts to take place in the classroom. Putting
them in a place where they are learning motor mechanics or bricklaying
or painting and decorating and where they have to use literacy
and numeracy as part of that and having the learning pod in the
middle of the workshop is a way of getting to that by different
means. As Andrew Coyle has said, so are pottery, painting, creative
work of all kinds which provides that business of engaging somebody
in the first place in something that perhaps for the first time
they can do well so that they can start to take pride in themselves
and their achievements. People come to learning through different
routes and it is important we continue to provide all those routes.
Q193 Bob Russell: So there is a place
for the arts that Mr Barraclough would approve of?
Ms Owers: There certainly is.
Q194 Bob Russell: Chief Inspector,
you will note that in many prisons there is an economic disincentive
for prisoners to provide education and skills training rather
than make money through prison work. How would you propose that
the Prison Service tackles that problem?
Ms Owers: The simple way of tackling
it is to make sure that it is equivalent and in some prisons that
happens. Governors have considerable discretion to decide how
prison wages are allocated. I have been in prisons where there
is no disadvantage to prisoners who chose to do education rather
than work.
Q195 Bob Russell: Surely the Home
Office must issue general directives and guidance to prison governors
with 138 different syllabuses.
Ms Owers: 138 different levels
of wages. There are not 138 but there are significant differences
between prisons. One of the things prisoners very commonly complain
about is the difference in the wage levels from the prison they
have come to and the prison they have left.
Q196 Bob Russell: We have got differences
on the wage levels. We are told there is a wide disparity in funding
and curriculum between prisons. Is that again the lack of guidance
and direction from the Home Office best practice around the country?
We have heard excellent stories about Canterbury today.
Ms Owers: I think those discrepancies
are being ironed out particularly because the funding for prison
education and training is now not provided by the Home Office
at all but by the Department for Education and Skills. The Department
for Education and Skills is insisting on certain levels of qualifications
for teachers and so on and that budget is ring-fenced. In the
past it was not unknown for the budget that supposedly existed
for education and training to be used for something else entirely.
Governors now cannot get at that budget, it is ring-fenced. The
problem is more that in many prisons they are not geared for education
and training and so the process of actually getting the prisoner
out of his or her cell and to the place where education and training
is happening may not happen at all if prisoners are not unlocked
or it may happen very late so that you get bits cut off both ends
of the workday or the education day. It is about making sure the
prison as a whole sees itself as a place where education and training
is happening rather than if you can manage to get people there
at all or on time.
Q197 Bob Russell: You are indicating
there is a huge gap between the best and the worst.
Ms Owers: There is.
Q198 Bob Russell: What are you doing
to ensure that the worst match the best?
Ms Owers: We are continually pointing
out where they are falling short and in that I think it is very
helpful that we inspect along with the Adult Learning Inspectorate
in adult prisons who are quite consciously comparing the services
that prisoners in prisons might get to the ones they would get
in a further education college and they are not very tolerant
of the excuse, "But this is a prison so we cannot do it any
other way."
Q199 Bob Russell: Basically we are
down to the priorities of the governors. We have already heard
that there is a rapid turnover of those governors, so surely there
should be some markers and some general best practice which all
governors can follow in order that we repeat the successes that
we have heard about such as Canterbury and I have indicated for
the training centre in Colchester.
Ms Owers: There are some basic
standards and I am sure the Prison Service will be able to tell
you about them in more detail when you take evidence from them.
For example, prisons are given a certain number of completions
of basic skills, Level 2 completions. The problem with those is
they can be too rigid since some prisoners need Level 1 and some
need Open University. So the problem when you set standards across
the piece is that you do need some flexibility for governors in
prisons to decide what their population is. What we say as an
Inspectorate is that each prison should do a needs analysis of
its prisoners and the provision it applies should be consequent
on that needs analysis which will be different in different kinds
of prison and different for different prisoners.
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