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