NS. The prison actually begged me to take a course on journalism freelance feature writing and editing with the London School of Journalism. The prison paid for that. That was before 1990, but the whole system changed after that. Before the Strangeways riot in 1990, education in prison was not really valued. They only wanted people to be able to understand the rules and so would give you only a basic level of education. The average wage a prisoner would receive was £7.50 a week for education. If you went into workshops, you could earn up to £30 a week, putting washers on bolts or packing sick packs for airplanes. Before Strangeways, if you were fairly well-educated and you wanted to do a degree, the prison would fund you for that. A lot of people did degree courses and a lot of people worked their way out of prison like that.
The prison system got better between 1990 and the end of 1991 because people started looking around for ways to improve the prisoners. One of the ways was education. Suddenly, education was a big thing.
Then, in 1991,a conservative home secretary called Michael Howard came in. He put everyone was back in their cells. Nobody was getting education anymore, and only a few people were working. Since that time, if you want to pursue a degree or any form of education in prison, it will not be funded. You need to be supported by an outside charity and beg, cap in hand, for them to fund your education. We have a prison population of 90,000, and two third of them have the reading and writing skills of a child under 12. You have got these vast swathes of uneducated people in prison, but the prison system does nothing for them.
The most embarrassing thing about the British prison system is that you could go into the prison system unable to read and write, spend 30 years in that system, and come out still unable to read and write.
I was lucky because things fell into place for me, but thousands of prisoners nowadays are not so lucky. Most of them have very little education, past trauma, and they go into a place where people think they are going to be made fit for society. That is not the case. Politicians pay a lot of lip service to the word rehabilitation, but in reality, very little is done. It is like tiny little islands in a great big ocean of rubbish.
I went down at the Rochester prison, in Kent, about four or five years ago. They had a fantastic scheme. They have mainly young prisoners. English Heritage went into that prison and said, “Look, we’d like to train some of your prisoners as stonemasons. They’ll never be outworked and we’ll offer them jobs after they’ve become stonemasons. The course takes 18 months to two years”. I saw some of the stuff they had made down there, and it was brilliant. But here is the rub: out of 700 people in the prison, the course could only take 12 prisoners. Twelve prisoners every two years are getting a form of real rehabilitation and education. They are set up for work in the future, while the rest are falling by the wayside. They do not put enough emphasis on education. It is the really poor cousin to industrial work and cleaning services in the prison system.