WCCM Prison Toolkit

Introduction

There are approximately 11.5 million people in prison in the world (source: World Prison Population List Oct 2021), 2 million of which (17%) are held in US prisons which has the highest prison population in the world based on the number of prisoners per 100,000 of population.

The purposes of prison worldwide are threefold:

• To protect the public from the most dangerous and violent individuals.
• To punish by depriving offenders of their liberty and certain freedoms enjoyed by the rest of society and thereby act as a deterrent.
• To rehabilitate and reduce the risk of reoffending by providing offenders with the opportunity to reflect on, and take responsibility for, their crimes and prepare them for a law-abiding life when they are released.

The extract below is from the UK Social Exclusion Report published over 20 years ago in July 2002 ‘Reducing Re-offending by Ex-Prisoners’. My background is in education, in particular the development of the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, and it was this report that prompted me to join the UK prison service in 2003 in the hope I could make a difference helping to improve education and employment prospects for prisoners in the UK.

Many prisoners have experienced a lifetime of social exclusion. Compared with the general population, prisoners are thirteen times as likely to have been in care as a child, thirteen times as likely to be unemployed, ten times as likely to have been a regular truant, two and a half times as likely to have had a family member convicted of a criminal offence, six times as likely to have been a young father, and fifteen times as likely to be HIV positive.

Many prisoners’ basic skills are very poor. 80 per cent have the writing skills, 65 per cent the numeracy skills and 50 per cent the reading skills at or below the level of an 11-year-old child. 60 to 70 per cent of prisoners were using drugs before imprisonment. Over 70 per cent suffer from at least two mental disorders. And 20 per cent of male and 37 per cent of female sentenced prisoners have attempted suicide in the past. The position is often even worse for
18–20-year-olds, whose basic skills, unemployment rate and school exclusion background are all over a third worse than those of older prisoners.

Despite high levels of need, many prisoners have effectively been excluded from access to services in the past. It is estimated that around half of prisoners had no GP before they came into custody; prisoners are over twenty times more likely than the general population to have been excluded from school; and one prison drugs project found that although 70 per cent of those entering the prison had a drug misuse problem, 80 per cent of these had never had any contact with drug treatment services.

There is a considerable risk that a prison sentence might actually make the factors associated with re-offending worse. For example, a third lose their house while in prison, two-thirds lose their job, over a fifth face increased financial problems and over two-fifths lose contact with their family. There are also real dangers of mental and physical health deteriorating further, of life and thinking skills being eroded, and of prisoners being introduced to drugs. By aggravating the factors associated with re-offending, prison sentences can prove counter-productive as a contribution to crime reduction and public safety.’ Ref: pages 6-7