"There is little value in providing literacy skills to an offender if the outcome is to release one morning a burglar who can now read and write but is still a burglar"

    Prison Education - A Gateway to Nowhere?
    The current approach to offender rehabilitation is based on the notion that offenders 'think differently' or more precisely put, have a lack of cognitive skills and should therefore undergo 'thinking skills' courses to learn to 'think and reason correctly'. Such courses as ETS and R&R have been around for some time and are claimed to reduce offending behaviour although such claims have been shown to have a very limited value according to Home Office Research Findings.
    The latest research also suggests that teaching offenders to empathize with their victims has made little difference to reconviction rates. Martin Narey the chief executive of the Prison and Probation Service now known as the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) a one-time advocate of offending behaviour programmes now suggests that teaching offenders to read and write could help them get a job and prevent them returning to crime.
    It is not clear what kind of job he might have in mind, for many prisoners have had no vocational skills training or have a trade to offer in the job market place. F or sure, there are many prisoners who do have self-acquired skills, those who can disassemble a car engine and reassemble it, carry out all kinds of construction tasks, operate machinery and do semi-skilled work and would benefit from being able to improve on those abilities, even passing on those skills to others.
    With the construction industry suffering serious shortages in all trades and salaries being at a premium, it beggars belief that the Prison Service has not seized upon that in offering a wider programme of vocational training. After all, painting and decorating, bricklaying, plumbing etc. and suchlike were always popular courses and over subscribed by prisoners when City and Guilds 'Vocational Training Courses' were running in most prisons until the introduction of offending behaviour programmes and the pseudo social and life skills courses now being run in many prison education departments.
    With the absence of any effective vocational training skills being offered, prison workshops are also increasingly being used as a mechanism to tack on some kind of meaningless qualification in spite of the fact that a recent internal report of Prison Industries acknowledged that, 'contract labour shops have little rehabilitative value, that the work is 'mind numbing' and offers no useful employment skills'.
    The notion that literacy skills alone are the solution is as simplistic as is providing a mechanism to 'think correctly' and is hardly likely to commend one in the job market. It may well enable one to understand social security forms and sign for their weekly benefits, but training it isn't for little training actually exists in prison.
    There is little value in providing literacy skills to an offender if the outcome is to release one morning a burglar who can now read and write but is still a burglar with even a lesser a stake in the community as an 'ex con' and little to offer in the job market and therefore a means to earn a living honestly.
    Such an offender may well still be attracted to a criminal lifestyle rather than what he or she might perceive as a meaningless work routine learned in prison.
    It has been suggested that prisoners ought to approach prison work as a positive and normalising experience although it is difficult to imagine what most prison work would equip one for in the community or what is normal about it.
    It might provide mere pocket money in prison for packing nuts and bolts in plastic bags but it is hardly likely to provide for a career move in the world outside of prison and rather than lifting an offender out of the criminal lifestyle it is more likely than not to drive them towards it.
    Prisoners can and often do feel exploited in the prison industries workshops and see themselves as cheap labour in an industry geared towards budgets, targets and key performance indicators which might have been avoided had the Government implemented the 1996 Prisoners Earnings Act that would have provided for prisoners to earn wages at a level whereby a proportions of those earnings would have gone towards contributing towards dependants maintenance, victim compensation and savings accounts for the prisoner's release.
    Because of the shortage of work in many prisons, many prisoners now come to see prison education as merely being 'another job', a place where for 'sitting out the dance' they can still benefit from prison earnings which might be their only source of Income.
    Yet, Home Office Research Finding 174 although noting the importance of qualifications to post-release employment also noted that those who acquired educational qualifications while in prison were statistically no more likely to have a paid job on release than those who had not attained educational achievements.
    It is also noteworthy that vocational training has now but almost disappeared from prisons to be replaced by literacy and mediocre educational training that provides for worthless certificates but more importantly a 'bums on seats' approach to prison education that often serves management more than the students.
    Without a doubt, there are many people standing in weekly dole queues who have no problem with reading and writing. Their problem is that being unskilled and without a trade, they like countless others are chasing the unskilled positions in a highly competitive market. The world is full of educated derelicts.
    It is clear that computer training which is the limit of vocational training in prisons requires a far lesser investment than perhaps a plumbing or bricklaying course and in talking about investment we ought also be talking about investing in a wider programme of training to accommodate those who may have abilities elsewhere or would like to acquire them.
    Perhaps we really have not progressed much beyond what the 19th century Prison Commissioner Sir Edward DuCane observed when he stated that:
    'Experience has shown that literacy education has not had the reformatory influence which we once expected from it, and that moral and vocational instruction are the most potent of the educational influences which can be employed to that end. '

Charles Hanson ~
HMP Cornhill ~
August 27th 2004

Charles Hanson 
VV 1638
HMP Cornhill
Shepton Mallet
BA4 5LU