Why shunning former prisoners drives them back to crime

In many respects Ben Gunn is a success story of the prison system. He committed a crime. He went to prison. He was educated while in prison. He is no longer a danger to society. He has no intention of re-offending. And he is now in part-time employment.

In 1980, at the age of 14, Ben killed his friend after an argument. He handed himself in to the police and pleaded guilty and a judge sentenced him to life in prison. The prison population then was 37,000. It’s now 87,000 and growing.

Prison moulded Gunn into a campaigner for penal reform, at first writing in the prison magazine before taking his writing to a wider and bigger audience through his blog. Some months he gets up to 25,000 hits on his website.

In August, after serving 32 years, he left prison. The transition for Gunn has not been easy.

Family support

On Sunday it was reported that the government may cut the prisoner release grant. A small sum of money given to prisoners upon release.

“Officially, £46 is all I’ve had to rely on in two months. Without family I would have starved to death. Literally.”

Mr Gunn has been signed on for weeks but has still not received any benefits.

“There are a lot of people who come out who will have far fewer friends and family around than when they went in. You don’t know where your next meal will come from. It’s an invitation to reoffend.”

“I have no form of ID, I can’t get a national insurance card. If I was a burglar I would be eyeing up windows.”

He was welcomed home by a brother, with whom he’s restored his relationship, and his partner, whom he met whilst inside. Without them, he says, he would be struggling.

Hostile world

He published a blog post recently about his first job interview. It was for a policy role at the Howard League, one of the prison system’s reform groups. Getting a job during a recession is hard enough without having a murder conviction.

To illustrate just how rarely interviews come along, he describes asking the interviewer, pointedly, if his interview was just a courtesy.

“Given the opportunity to ask a question of my own, I had the temerity to ask: ‘Are you giving me an interview just to get me off your backs, or is this a genuine opportunity?’ That was, I thought, a ballsy move if not a daft one!”

He was assured they were serious about him. And though they didn’t offer him that job, he has just recently signed up to be a consultant policy adviser for them.

“Any prisoner, with the best will in the world, can want to change – but then he walks out into a world that’s hostile to him,” he says.

Recidivism rates vary from 25 per cent to 75 per cent across the prison estate. A huge range that is natural given the factors involved: age, socio-economic background, nature of crime, the prison and the length of the punishment.

But Mr Gunn said that apart from ineffective rehabilitation programmes, culturally there is an ingrained sense that convicts should be punished eternally.

Reoffending rates

That, he says, is counter-productive. By shunning convicts you drive them to crime.

“How is any prisoner supposed to find his way back in [to society]? It constantly rejects us. In that respect we get the reoffending rate that society deserves. It’s partly self-inflicted.”

In addition, the provision of assistance for those who re-enter society after many years locked away is inadequate.

“I’m stuck in a loop,” Gunn went on, “where I can’t get an ID because I don’t have the right ID to get a driving licence. It’s absurd.

“No-one is in any rush to join the dots. These things will work out for me. But for other people in less favourable circumstances, it’s a terrible prospect. “

Nowhere to go

And there are thousands who leave British prisons each year who face that prospect. There are those who have nowhere to go when they leave.

“If you’re homeless on release, you get a grant of £96 which is to last you four weeks until your benefits kick in,” said Mr Gunn.

Of those who leave prison each year, 30 per cent report to be homeless. And recent figures show that they are almost twice as likely to reoffend than those who are not. Almost all of them will re-offend within one year of being released.

Mr Gunn does not claim to have spent his time inside embroidering a rehabilitation programme that would kill recidivism rates dead, but he has one proposal that would obviously reduce prison numbers.

“The biggest change that could be made is to save imprisonment for those that are truly causing significant harm. As it is, most prisoners are not in for crimes of violence or sexual crimes. The majority of prisoners are people who commit crimes against property or drug addicts – non violent crime.

“Prison as a response to these crimes isn’t right. The damage that imprisonment does is greater than the damage of the original crime. He is stripped of all his social capital, his job. From an economic point of view, society is writing off 30 to 40 years of taxes if you render him unemployed.”

Potential for corruption

David Cameron championed the role of private enterprise in his “prison reform revolution”, offering “more choice, more competition, more openness” and inviting charities and companies to “come and help us rehabilitate our prisoners”.

Yet Mr Gunn, who has served time in both public and private prisons, describes a noticeable difference in the two.

“In public prisons, even though staff may join up because they want the pension there is a public service ethos that exists.”

In private prisons, he says of the staff, “there is less between them and us”. Human attachments are formed and the potential for corruption is much greater.

“In private prison you’re taking people from supermarket check-outs. You put them through a couple of months of training and bring them into a prison. They have no historical background in prisons.”

Cherry-picking

As for payment by results schemes, the pilots have produced promising results but prison reform groups such as the Howard League has raised concerns with the strategy way back in 2011.

The organisation’s assistant director of public affairs and policy Andrew Neilson asked what exactly is a “result”? How can you avoid private companies simply reaping the rewards of others hard work?

“We fear that payment by results will lead to cherry-picking by providers, as the inevitable focus will be on those individuals who are most likely to deliver a result,” said Mr Neilson.

The pilot in Peterborough calculated reoffending within one year rather than the traditional two years used by statistics in the criminal justice system.

Reoffending rates measure re-convictions, which is why two years is allowed to allow a reasonable length time for trials. So the successful payment by results pilot in Peterborough may not have been a fair comparison.