Back on the chain gang

More than three years ago I thought I'd ask the prison service a relatively simple question. What kind of contracts do individual prisons hold with private companies for inmates to carry out work?

Not so simple apparently, as it took a ruling from the Information Commissioner to force them to answer.

Now The Guardian has published the first fruits of the investigation sparked by that question and the digging of myself and my colleague Richard Cookson.

Prisoners will be able to earn "real wages" for doing "real work" in jail under radical new plans being drawn up by the Conservatives and penal reformers.

The shadow justice minister, Edward Garnier, [note: now replaced in this role by Alan Duncan] said the Tory party will encourage more private companies and charities to offer work and training in jails if it wins the next election.

"I want to see prisoners doing real work, not mere time-filling, and I want to see them earning wages that will incentivise them into seeing a connection between effort and reward," he said.

The announcement comes as Society Guardian reveals that inmates in UK jails are working for some of Britain's best-known brands for as little as £4 a week. Household names including Virgin Atlantic, Monarch Airlines, Speedy Hire, Travis Perkins and book publisher Macmillan are benefiting from work carried out by prisoners in England and Wales. More than 100 smaller companies are using prison labour to produce everything from holiday brochures, novelty name-tags and balloons to industrial mouldings and, ironically, security chains.

There is an excellent piece by prison writer Eric Allison to accompany our Guardian articles.

Richard and I have put together our own web site looking at this issue and there is much to discuss:
What companies have contracts for prison labour?
How effective are these contracts?
How much to companies do make from prison labour?
Why are prisoners not subject to the minimum wage?
Are consumers aware of how much prison labour is used?

The Conservatives have been spending a lot of time thinking about prison reform and have come up with some radical suggestions about how they'd like to reform the prison service.

The National Offender Management Service would be scrapped and as for the wages paid to prisoners:

"Under the supervision of the prison governor, some of the money would go to support their dependents on the outside – who might otherwise lose their tenancies or default on mortgages and thus get thrown on to the welfare system at additional public expense – some would be paid into a victims' fund, and a small proportion would be kept by the governor to enable the prisoner to buy necessities in prison," said Edward Garnier.

The Tories plan to double the number of prisoners working behind bars to 20,000 in an effort to teach skills that mean they don't head straight back into  re-offending.

It seems hard to argue with their assertion that prison policy under Labour has become one soley of managing overcrowding.

So how do progressive politicians plan to counter these penal arguments?