Prisons in the UK, and most other Westernised nations, place a great deal of empasis on training life skills, and employment skills, the balance between them has tended to swing between the two.
Life skills are programmes such as improving cognitive thinking, harm reduction from substances including alchohol and tobacco, offending behaviour and what leads individuals into the circumstances where they are more likel to commit crime, and mental health issues, there are many more.
Skills and employment training are easier to imagine, workshops where skills in vehicle repair, catering, computer literacy, construction trades are pretty much stock in trade.
Unfortunately, trade training will not equip the overwhelimg majority, just as it would not work for the majority of the non-criminal population.
The reason for this was researched by the Training and Skills council around 20 years ago, but those findings are still relevant, even though much of the agency that produced the report no longer exists.
Trade training depends hugely on the selection of suitable candidates and the fact is, the general population pretty much selects itself, those wanting to beome, for instance bricklayers, will seek the training themselves and gain employment in that field.
Of those who are changing trades due to redundancy, or have simply not been able to find employment previously, less than 5% of them end up being suitable, for many reasons including education and the real big reason - motivation.
Don’t underestimate motivation, most take a job or trade for personal reasons, it may be they are from a family background of engineers, or perhaps they feel its ‘right for them’, but whatever it is, for most people there is a reason that they have taken up their particular vocation, and sheer economic necessity, or desparation emplyment seems largely confined to the McJobs of this world.
When we are addressing prisoners needs, the first thing you have to consider is that these folk are largely lazy, greedy and have lots of desires.
Add to this the striking fact that educationally they are usually in the very lowest levels of academic achievement, so that the few who actually might be suitable for training make up a tiny percentage of that 5% of the population that are suitable for trade training.
Its also true that those who might be suitable, are also the ones who actually make money out of crime and so they have little incentive to take a regular job.
By the time we get them in adult prisons its already too late, they will have a record of offending going back 8 to 10 years, and its those years that are the crucial ones, because that is when their patterns of thought developed, its when their brains made all those neural connections that allow them to learn.
To be honest the big problem is education during the formative years, its here where money should be spent, not in prisons, its in schools that you reduce crime.
Having classes of 30 students may well be more economic than 15 students, however in the UK it worth noting that the fee paying schools which are the education providers of our wealthy elites tend to achieve better academic grades(there are exceptions, some state schools are very good too), and those expensive schools have much much lower student teacher ratios, in certain specialisms it can be around 7 to 1 .
Our state schools have perhaps 30 to 35 in a class, our truant chasing system is ineffective and it is only very recently that parents have been held accountable for the poor attendance of their offspring through the use of the judiciary.
Most offenders give up on crime in their mid to late 30’s, probations workers claim the magic age is 26.
Quite frankly, it would be better to hold repeat offenders until they are 40 or maybe 50, when their ability for violence is reduced, and they are not in a position to influence the upbringing of their children,
