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Monday 26 September 2011

by Will Stone, Health & Social Affairs Reporter

 

Legislation geared at scooping up to £1 million a year from prisoners' wages to put towards supporting crime victims was criticised today as a false economy.

Under the Prisoners' Earnings Act, which came into force yesterday, 40 per cent of prisoners' wages over £20 per week - after tax, national insurance and any court-ordered or child support payments - will be deducted and given to Victim Support.

The victims' fund will affect about 500 inmates doing work in the community but ministers are also planning to bring in powers to target the wages of prisoners working inside jails - though the average prisoner working behind bars earns just £10 a week.

Policing Minister Nick Herbert said: "For too long the financial burden of repairing the damage done by crime has fallen to the taxpayer alone."

Victim Support welcomed the move, saying that the money will be used "to deliver real, practical support for victims and communities."

But prison reform charities said funding for crime victims should come from other sources.
Howard League for Penal Reform chief executive Frances Crook said employers might not co-operate and prisoners might not work.

"So Victim Support will lose out, the community will lose out, people won't have a job to come out to when they are released. Everybody will lose."

Prison Reform Trust director Juliet Lyon also said it was important not to put prisoners off working altogether.
She added: "It's always a problem if people leave prison with absolutely nothing. It's likely to cause further offending. And so a scheme like this has to be thought through carefully so that money is set aside for victims but that we also pay attention to resettlement."

willstone@peoples-press.com

 

Prisoners need a space in which to be themselves

For prisoners, the time and opportunity to get involved in something can bring back the real person

Alan Smith
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 July 2011

Inside prison, the education department is one of the spaces where men sometimes feel able to let down their defences a little and live, just briefly, an ordinary life. Our philosophy class is that sort of space and sometimes we just drift into whatever happens to interest us.

This week we were reading Chaucer. I was taken aback by the enthusiasm the guys showed. And then we drifted; I think Ade was telling us something about Africa. I began to fret that we had left philosophy far behind. The school teacher in me wanted to stay on task. And then we drifted some more.

"We're not really doing philosophy are we?" I said. Ade waved my anxiety away, reassured me that all they really wanted was a little bit of space: "where we can have this sort of conversation, let our hair down and be ourselves". He and Sam told me about the caution, the arm's length discretion that they practised back on the wing, not at all like the openness that we had in class. "When someone new shows up," said Sam, "he might be OK for the first couple of weeks and then he starts on you." "So you really take time to weigh people up," said Ade. Not unlike ordinary life, except that being in prison magnifies the consequences of getting it wrong.

Casey started to tell us about the Anne Frank exhibition, which was visiting the prison. "They've asked a bunch of us to present the exhibits." He and Ian had thrown themselves into it; they had learned the material, erected the stands, set out the chapel and found a space that was free. Later, I spoke to Mark, the officer attached to the project. "This has brought the men back to life," he said, "they've been themselves. This has been an oasis, given them back their humanity. Rules are easy; it's much more difficult to let men make decisions.'

One evening, I brought in my wife to see the exhibition and she shook her head, as people do, at the wire and the fences. We went inside, turned down a corridor and there were the men, waiting to get through a gate. I said hello to Casey and introduced him to my wife. He took her hand, smiled, and there was someone I hadn't spotted before. I'd always seen him as a man with a no-nonsense, head-on attitude to things, full of enthusiasm, and now here was someone who was a little bit reticent, genteel, and, yes, it cannot be denied, charming. I called Ian over and he was the same, more-so. It struck me for the first time that perhaps Ian was quite a shy person. These guys have to make a life inside the prison and it's not easy. It made me wonder what kind of a performance I would turn in if I had a few years to do.

The exhibition was a huge success, of course it was, and afterwards there were questions and comments from the audience. But it was getting on for half past seven and Mark had to bring things to a close. "I'm afraid ladies and gentlemen that this is all we have time for. I have to get these boys tucked up for the night." One lady looked a bit puzzled and she said: "Oh are they staying here then?" "Well, yes, they are." Mark told her, "I"m afraid they have to." "What, are they...?" She wasn't being silly; she was expressing the way we all felt. "You'd never think you were in a prison," my wife said. There were the guys in their best clothes, and there, around us all, the space that they had made.

Votes for prisoners: Bang to rights

It has been a rough week for the coalition, and the Lib Dems' ambitions for constitutional reform have had the worst of it. The battle for the alternative vote teeters between success and disaster, while the attempt to allow prisoners the vote is taking on water. Complying with the 2004 ruling from the European court of human rights is still on the agenda, but in so weak a manner as to be likely to provoke a new legal challenge.
To read more click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/24/editorial-prisoners-vote-echr?CMP=twt_gu

Why deny prisoners the vote?

Is the right to vote a fundamental human right? You could be forgiven for assuming that the answer is yes, given the way that so many modern politicians talk about it. Yet the phrase "right to vote" does not occur in the universal declaration of human rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Nor is it to be found in the European convention on human rights of two years later.

Click here to read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/21/prisoners-right-to-vote