Vocational training: a route out of a life of crime?

By Chris Sims
chris.sims@skillsdevelopment.org

More than 9.25 million people are imprisoned around the world. Most will be released into society during their working lives. When they are, adjusting to life outside is a serious challenge, and many quickly return to custody. Of the 275,000 American prisoners released in 1994, 67.5% were rearrested within three years, and 51.8% returned to prison.

Some believe that prison should be about punishment, not about helping offenders to prepare for life after release. But with such high prison populations in many countries - and the implications for the public purse - there is a strong case to be made for using prison as a rehabilitative tool. Education and training is a key part of achieving this change, giving offenders skills, tools and motivation to change their lives after release.

What sort of education? Arguably, the most important factor in a prisoner's rehabilitation is that they should be able to find and keep a job. Most people who re-offend are unemployed at the time. The quality of the job is also a factor: 'good jobs' and 'meaningful work' appear to reduce the likelihood of criminal behaviour.

So vocational training explicitly aimed at employment opportunities is a natural fit. Yet evaluations of vocational training programmes in prisons show varied results in terms of their impact on re-offending. This may be due to a number of other factors that impact on prisoners' lives after release.

Firstly, many prisoners have more fundamental needs - such as anger management or stopping substance abuse - that must be addressed if vocational training is to be effective. Prisoners may also need help with basic skills: many will have left school with no qualifications at all. Basic literacy and numeracy training may be required in many cases. For ex-offenders to be employable, these needs must be identified and addressed alongside any technical skills training.

Secondly, new skills alone are not enough to enable prisoners to make a successful transition to life upon release. For many offenders, this transition requires the construction of a whole new social reality: old networks must be abandoned and new networks of friends and social supports constructed. Other issues such as housing and health present particular challenges for many former prisoners. Releasing an offender without wider support means expecting him or her to manage this process alone - something that many struggle with. Programmes that provide ex-prisoners with this wider support in addition to training during their sentence have shown encouraging results in terms of reintegration into society. In Texas, for instance, the Prison Entrepreneurship Programme founded by Catherine Rohr gives offenders a new start by training them to start and run their own businesses. Its success is dependent on giving participants 'no excuse to return to a life of crime' by providing a broad programme of support covering assistance with housing, medical care, transport and job placement opportunities. Less than 5% of the programme's graduates have returned to prison since its inception in 2004.

Thirdly, ex-prisoners need support in overcoming the prejudice they face, particularly from potential employers. In George Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, he said: "America is the land of the second chance, and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life." The reality, in the USA and elsewhere, is very different. Employer discrimination is one of the most common labour market disadvantages faced by ex-prisoners. It's hard to get to a better life when you are faced with society's cold shoulder. Such discrimination tends to reflect concerns that ex-offenders will not make good employees, rather than fear of a repeat crime. So programmes teaching basic work skills to prisoners - that include opportunities for contact with potential employers - should pay off in terms of enabling prisoners to find work on release. In the UK, the Prisoners' Education Trust recently found that improving contact with potential employers is a key priority for prisoner learners.

Fourthly, institutional and structural problems can seriously affect training programmes in prisons. The training offer can lack coherence across different prisons, and short-notice prison transfers can lead to the termination of training programmes or the loss of training records. Security issues can mean sudden cancellation of classes and limit learners' access to technology, particularly online tools. Training is often based on compulsion, which denies prisoners ownership of the decision to train and arguably damages motivation. In many cases, compulsory education has already been a negative experience for offenders: it is unlikely to prove different in adult life. Steps should therefore be taken to minimise such disruption to training and to engage prisoner learners on a voluntary basis.

Fifthly, adequate funding is absolutely essential. Policy goals and aspirations have not always been accompanied by the necessary resources to meet them: in April this year, for instance, an inspection of Parc Prison in Wales found that it had only 70 education places and 289 work places for a prison population of 1200, despite being officially designated a training prison.

If all these factors are incorporated, programmes can use vocational training to enable ex-offenders to become productive members of society. Such programmes are not cheap. But then neither is prison.

Most importantly of all, successful programmes need the buy-in of policy makers and prison authorities to a vision of prison as an opportunity to offer offenders a second chance in society, as well as a place of punishment. In Texas, Catherine Rohr realised that prisoners represent a huge waste of human capital potential and set about capturing it. Belief in that potential is the first step to achieving it.

Did you find the article useful? Vote now