Blind ambition

Ken Clarke is an ambitious man. He wants to increase to 20,000 the number of prisoners who work during their sentence. At the moment out of nearly 87,000 prisoners only around 9,000 have any sort of job inside. Five hundred of those have full-time jobs outside the walls, leaving prison during the day and returning at night as part of a preparation for release plan. The rest do more or less mundane jobs inside on contracts made by companies with the prison service.

Your Remembrance Day poppy may well have been assembled within those walls, together with the headphones for the in-flight movie, which lasted more or less until the credits rolled. Such work is hardly challenging, the pay is notional and the skills it generates may not amount to very much '“ but there is no doubt that having any sort of a job in prison is massively more productive, interesting and useful than the 22 hours per day spent in a cell staring at the walls or, even worse, daytime television, waiting for the next vile meal. Having something to do, using any skills at all, learning how to concentrate, having a reason to get out of bed, being with others doing the same thing '“ these are all strong positives.

And not all the work done inside is low-level assembly work: there have been and are creative and challenging schemes where technical and industrial skills are learned and used. Work in prison does have to teeter along a fairly fine line: it cannot be either exploitative 'slave labour' of the prisoners, or be used as punishment, as it was in the bad old days '“ to which of course we will never return. Nor can it be seen to deprive those at liberty of work; imagine the headlines if a factory was closed down and the work diverted to a prison instead.

But once those lines are properly negotiated, what's not to like? It is not to be expected that more than about a third of prisoners would either want or be able to hold down a job inside; the mental, physical and emotional health problems of a majority of prisoners, as well as the outright refusal of some to engage at all, limit the numbers. Surely even doubling the amount of jobs inside is not only a worthy ambition but achievable? It needs political will '“ and Mr Clarke has enough of that surely? '“ and of course extra funding for more prison officers to oversee workshops and deal with the necessary administration. Ah.

Bursting point

As everyone knows, our prisons are overstretched and to bursting point at the moment. Prisoners wait for months, even years, to get onto education courses, to get into work schemes, even to get onto the mandatory courses that are needed to establish the basic requirements for approaching the Parole Board for release from indeterminate sentences. As Clarke himself has acknowledged, there are around 6,000 IPP prisoners languishing inside and no one can say when or if they will be released. The IPP system was such a disaster that it is going to be scrapped '“ provisions for its repeal are in the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill going through parliament at the moment. Regulations to ease IPP prisoners out of prison may even be made, perhaps even short of their having to establish they are no longer dangerous as they do at the moment.

If IPP goes, and no more such sentences are passed to clog up the system even further, then one might begin to hope that funds would be released for the neglected other aim of custody '“ rehabilitation, in which learning how to work forms such an important part. Ah. Again.

The Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill gives with one hand and takes away with the other. No more IPP, but instead a two strikes and you are out system. The offences that could have generated an IPP can now generate an automatic life sentence. Under the new provisions the court must impose a life sentence where the new offence was serious enough to merit ten years inside, as long as the previous qualifying offence was punished by a sentence that meant at least five years inside before eligibility for release. Practically, that means a ten-year sentence imposed since April 2005, and sentences over eight years imposed before that date.

There is a saving grace '“ the court can side step a life sentence if it is unjust in particular circumstances of the offence. But courts, however many saving graces there are, do use the sentencing powers they are given: we can expect more life sentences.

We can expect more prisoners: can we expect more jobs for them? Mr Clarke is a clever man '“ but how he can juggle his ambitions for rehabilitative productive prison time and longer sentences is a mystery indeed.