Why Prison Radio?
Reducing re-offending benefits us all.
Equipping prisoners with the skills and confidence necessary to find work upon release is crucial in bringing down re-offending rates.
Prison radio aims to make best use of the opportunity prison provides to stop people offending for good in order to build a safer society for all.
Prison radio provides a unique and innovative way to engage prisoners in education, particularly those hard to reach offenders disenfranchised from the education system.
Jake’s a role model now
Positive: Teenager who had ASBO revoked is to be Ambassador.
At the beginning of the year, Jake Warburton-Jones was hit with an Asbo – but after turning his life around, he has been announced as an Ambassador for the Special Olympics.
The 17 year old became only the second person in Leicester to have the order wiped out, following months of hard work trying to improve relationships between teenagers and pensioners on the Thurnby Lodge estate.
After reading Jake’s story in the Leicester Mercury, Special Olympics Director, Steve Humphries decided he would be a perfect role model to help promote the games, which are being held in Leicester in 2009.
The teenager joins some of Leicester’s most famous sports stars, including Gary Lineker, Martin Johnson, Mark Selby and Milan Mandaric, to act as a spokesman for the event.
Jake said he was ‘really pleased’ his efforts since receiving the Asbo had paid off.
He said ‘I got a letter asking if I wanted to do it, so I said yes. I’m really pleased, although I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be doing yet. It’s good that all the stuff I’ve done has been recognised so I’m pleased. My mum’s really pleased as well’.
Jake was given an Asbo in January, after intimidating residents and shop workers in Thurncourt Road.
Since then, he has been determined to change his life for the better, and recently organised a trip to Skegness for more than 50 pensioners and youngsters living in Thurnby Lodge.
Again, when his story was told in the Mercury, anti-social workers discovered the positive impact the teenager was making on the community, and his order was removed.
Mr Humphries said Jake is a positive role model for other teenagers.
He said: with the Games we really want to reach out to all communities, people from all walks of life, and we need people to spread the word about what is happening. Jake is a perfect example of a young person who is really making a difference, and that is being recognised. I saw his story and I was blown away – I thought it was fantastic’.
Article from Leicester Mercury 19th July 2009 – Written by Gemma Peplow
Ed: For more on the volunteering opportunities during the Special Olympics see Citizens Eye
Clives Blog – Offender eLearning
“Prompted by my discovery of the Learning and Skills Council funded Offender Learning and Skills Service, I attended a NIACE conference in Bradford at the beginning of the month concerned with e-learning for offenders. Offender learning covers a wide range of institutions from Category A prisons to institutions providing support for non-custodial offenders.
“The priority for all custodial institutions is security. Prison governors have tremendous authority and are obviously nervous about the use of the internet and other means of communications, In most institutions CDs and pen drives are banned, necessitating tightly controlled computer networks (where they exist at all).
“The requirements for offender learning in order to assist rehabilitation and a reduction in re-offending are clear.
“It has been well publicised that a significant proportion of offenders require basic literacy and numeracy education. Less well known is the need for English as a second language courses.”
Read Clives Blog – Topic: Offender eLearning
What hope for prisoner rehabilitation?
Prison is meant to rehabilitate. Eric Allison writes on prisons and criminal justice in the Guardian’s Joe Public blog, on questions of mistreatment of officers by other officers and asks what hope there is for prisoners in such an environment. – 9th April 2008.
Comments included:
“Nobody takes real responsibility for rehabilitation; it’s against the spirit of our punitive times. Lip-service only is paid to it. Probation was long ago converted to an organisation devoted to ‘managing’ offenders (public protection) or dispensing community punishment. Prison governors always, and I mean always, have security as their number one priority. And so there is no real advocacy for rehabilitation. What is needed is effective case work on behalf of individual prisoners to assist rehabilitation. Offender behaviour programmes, education, resettlement initiatives and the rest are delivered piecemeal. There are some successes, but in general prisons do containment and punishment reasonably well, but not rehab. Which, in the end, produces negative and demoralising effects on prisoners and staff alike.
To introduce a proper rehabilitative regime in prisons and on release will take political vision and courage. It ain’t there”
and …
“Not using the opportunity prison provides to do something positive is one of the most mystifying state failures. Here you have criminals, both career and nascent, gathered together, under government control, 24 hours a day. And what do we do with them? Educate them? Teach them skills that could lead to jobs in the outside world? Give them serious and continued help to get off drugs?
Nope, we just lock them up for hours on end, and pay thousands for the privilege. Bonkers, absolutely bonkers.”
Capacity Building
Minor offence causes major knockback
Mahid Ahmed is, by all appearances, a young man who is going places. Aged 18, very bright with 4 A-grade A-levels, volunteer work for disabled charities and £11,000 raised to send poor children on an adventure camp under his belt, Mahid can claim a record of achievement more than befitting of his dreams of a place at Imperial College London to study medicine.
But when he disclosed a criminal conviction, a small part in a burglary at the end of 16 that resulted in a four-month period of community service, Majid found the place he had already been granted withdrawn. His hopes of becoming a doctor were crushed.
Reported in the Daily Mail on July 3rd, Majid’s story is stark example of the prejudice that can face those with a conviction to disclose. Imperial stated that ‘Medical practitioners hold a position of responsibility in society and must often deal with vulnerable people. The public must have confidence in the integrity and probity of its doctors’.
But this blanket approach refuses to consider the individual merits and situation of an applicant already acknowledged, by Imperial’s selection process, to have the academic and personal qualities demanded by the course and the profession.
Growing, maturity and earning trust and responsibility is a process that, for all, involves taking risks, making mistakes and learning from them. Majid was punished immediately for his transgression, recognised the lesson and used the experience to enhance his thinking about his life path – his decision was to serve his community in future. This kind of positive choice should be encouraged rather than obstructed.
Majid acknowledged the role bad company played in his offending. His striving to join the social groups, and expectations, of those receiving an Imperial College medical education is proof of his desire to lead a life very different from the one in which he grew up.
The value lacking in Imperial College’s decision is one of the fundamental traditions of the western world – forgiveness for genuine repentance. Once the criminal justice system applies its punishment, it should not be the task of academics to apply themselves as moral arbiters and reapply the penalty.
Four-months of community service pales by comparison as a punishment to being shut out of a life-changing educational opportunity, and the chance to fulfil a dream. A chance is all Majid Ahmed asks.
Editor: Andy
HMP Wolds – the Summit of success
HMP Wolds gives prisoners free rein
How much can prisoners really achieve while inside? At HMP Wolds the levels of trust placed in inmates and officers has allowed prisoners to gain unprecedented levels of new professional skills, at the same time creating a business turning over £17million.
HMP Wolds is a category C prison five miles from Market Weighton in East Yorkshire, and is Britain’s first privately run jail. 20 inmates at any one time are employed by Summit Media at the office inside the prison ground, earning up to £35 a week – great money for inside.
Summit Media is an online marketing company with high profile clients, such as Panasonic UK, suppliers on the west coast of America and a recently added European HQ in Prague. It delivers internet marketing and website development. Panasonic UK’s manager describes the company as ‘skilful and effective’.
In the busy Wolds office the staff including inmates wear T-shirts with the company logo and work at their computer terminals where phones ring off the hook all day. With no prisoner officers supervising and a corporate, motivated atmosphere prevailing, the environment is more like any modern, thriving office on the outside, and seems a world away from the expectations of a traditional prison environ.
It’s all a long way forward from the humble beginnings in the prison grounds in a small port-a-cabin with two desks. Entrepreneurial Managing Director Hedlay Aylott and Operations Manager Charlotte Ridley have been at the helm of the operation since they founded it in 2000. They are enthusiastic about the opportunity working for
the company extends to inmates.
“Guys discover a different path here and find the respect the gain is intoxicating,” says Aylott. “I’d say some of the best people I’ve ever worked with did time here. Many swear that this is the best opportunity they ever had.”
“The Summit training I’ve been given is invaluable,” says inmate and company employee Lyndon Bairstow, 25, in for death by dangerous driving. Paul Sherrington, 40, agrees – “I’d never been on the internet before I walked into this building 18 months ago.” Now he’s the online marketing account manger. With a 12 year sentence for holding up a security van and a past including drug dealing, a gambling habit and youth custody from the age of 15, Summit is a lifeline for him – the first real chance, and reason, to decide to change.
All prisoners who get the opportunity to work for Summit get six months training in e-commerce, particularly in search marketing, and sit the IPA (Institue of Practitioners in Advertising) exams, which qualifies them to manage marketing campaigns for clients such as Google, Microsoft, Panasonic, Yahoo and 3Mobile. These are qualifications and hands-on relevant experience and skills which really prepare them to be attractive to employers in the outside.
It’s the emphasis on opportunity and building up employable skills that appeals to prison service authorities, and persuaded them to allow the controlled additional freedoms that facilitate employees to carry out the business and training. “It was a huge step allowing prisoners controlled, business-related internet access and phone calls,” says Aylott. “IT security from the prison service were very involved of course.”
The support in particular of the prison’s 61-year old director, Dave McDonnell. “Initially I was sceptical that Hedley could teach prisoners the level of skills necessary to achieve the results they’re now achieving,” he says. “[but] we must remember the high rates of prisoner re-offending within the first years after release. We must keep finding ways – ways like this – of positively influencing offending behaviour.”
He’s clear what are the main measures that are effective in bring this about. “If you can teach prisoners skills that will give them a good future income and a working day lifestyle, you’re 90 percent of the way there,” he says. In eight years, only two of the 250 inmates who have worked for Summit have re-offended.
The organisation’s contribution to helping ex-offenders build a better life doesn’t stop when the prisoner is coming up to release. The company helps men coming to the end of their sentence to find a job, either through the web or industry publications. Some stay with Summit working from the outside. Some start their own e-business or even get jobs with Summit’s clients.
Robert Barker 26, is one of the latter of these, and the latest of Summit employees’ many rehabilitation success stories. Released from Wolds last November he left behind a past of repeat offending and prison visits that began when he started stealing cars aged 16. He now works on the marketing section at Townsend Farm, a Summit client who were impressed by the work he did for them, on a salary of #17,000. “I hope I’m a senior account manager in four years.” He says, “It’s changed my life.”
Just two applicants a month get to join the company, by applying to adverts in Inside Times – the free newspaper distributed in all prisons, and making their presentation to Summit’s discerning selection panel. A transfer to Wolds is the result of selection and the beginning of a new and promising future.
As such the opportunity is still one being extended only to a lucky few. But with the positive impact of its progressive measures on the offending behaviour of inmates so visible, the project deserves to be a template for many more projects of its kind.
Editor: Andy
Ann Widdecombe: Does Prison Work?
Ann Widdecombe speaking in 2000 said prison works because “When people are locked up they can’t commit any further crime”.
Further points included:
- Prison does not do anything like as much as it should to prevent crime
- It only defers crime, it does not solve it
- Rehabilitating offenders was not some wet liberal extra, it is necessary
- If people spend any length of time in prison they should not leave without being able to read and write
- Self financing prison workshops were the way forward
For the full article on BBC News
Does Prison Work? – Overseas Evidence 2003
The Government has set out to reduce crime, but the evidence from a study comparing the policies pursued in the USA with those in England and Wales suggests it has adopted the wrong policies.
From the early 1980s until the mid-1990s the risk of imprisonment increased in the USA and the crime rate fell; while in England and Wales the opposite happened: the risk of imprisonment fell and the crime rate increased.
Then, from 1993, policy in England and Wales was reversed and the risk of imprisonment increased, though it remained historically low. Even this relatively small increase in the use of prison was followed by a reduction in crime.
For the full report – CIVITAS The Institute for the Study of Civil Society
Does Prison Work? The Guardian
The Guardian’s prison columnist, Erwin James , reflects on the lessons of 16 years under lock and key in an article written on Monday January 29 2001.
(JC: interesting to note the prison population seven years ago and how the tabloid headlines are still saying the same things)
“Almost 63,000 people live behind bars in Britain, about the same number as live in Guildford. They are locked up in our name, yet we know remarkably little about the life they lead. Are we too hard on our criminals – or, as the tabloid headlines frequently suggest, too soft? And more importantly: does prison ever work?”