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The UK’s private prison operators are giving jobs to dozens of former convicts as they come under pressure to tackle cycles of reoffending and overcrowding.
Conglomerates including Sodexo, a French outsourcing group that operates five jails in the UK, and prison services provider Amey said they were stepping up efforts to recruit former prisoners across their wider businesses, for jobs ranging from kitchen assistants to highway technicians.
The moves are part of an effort to address what officials have said is a prison estate nearing maximum capacity, with many places occupied by people who served their sentence but reoffended after struggling to find employment.
The “revolving door” of offenders leaving and re-entering jail was an issue for all prisons, said Tony Simpson, Sodexo’s justice operations director. Providing employment reduced the risk of reoffending by offering people “a bit of hope”, he added.
While former offenders struggle to find work — many employers bar them from applying — prison operators are joining some other businesses in trying to open up more opportunities.
Sodexo said it had recruited at least 96 people with criminal convictions so far this year, up from just 28 during the whole of 2023, including as kitchen porters, assistants and chefs. The group added that at least 31 recruited this year joined its wider business within six weeks of leaving one of Sodexo’s own prisons.
The company hopes the initiative will also help it address its own worker shortages.
“We suffer from the same employment issues that everybody else does,” said Simpson. “Cleaning, catering. These kinds of jobs are the jobs that prisoners do very regularly in prison.”
As of last week, some 86,089 people were in 123 prisons across England and Wales, occupying 97 per cent of usable prison capacity, according to the Ministry of Justice.
During the year to March, only 31 per cent of ex-offenders found employment six months after being released. Those still unemployed six weeks after their release are the most likely to reoffend, according to analysis by the Ministry of Justice.
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Prisoner support charities hope the government’s new prisons minister Lord James Timpson, former chief executive of the Timpson shoe repair and key cutting chain, could drive change given his company’s record of recruiting former prisoners.
Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust, a prisoner support group previously chaired by Timpson, said “stigma against employing people with criminal convictions still remains”.
But she added that “there are countless examples of organisations already seeing the benefits to their businesses” of employing ex-prisoners.
Amey, an engineering services group that also does maintenance work in jails across the UK, said it had recruited 30 prison leavers since 2022 into roles including highway technicians and building control officers. Six of the nine people recruited so far this year came from prisons where the group provides facilities management.
Serco, which operates five UK prisons, said it had offered interviews to more than 1,000 ex offenders over the past year, but declined to comment on the number of jobs offered. Mitie, which is set to run the new HMP Millsike prison from next spring, said it had committed to providing 1,000 living-wage jobs for prison leavers as part of its contract.
G4S, which runs four UK jails, declined to comment on how many people it had recruited from prison.
While prison reform campaigners welcome these moves, they point out that the number of people being recruited by private prison companies was just a fraction of those leaving their jails. Many of the prisons run by the companies have also been criticised for poor safety and conditions.
Cat Hobbs, director of anti-privatisation group We Own It, said prison company efforts to recruit ex-offenders were “very positive” but added that the numbers “a drop in the ocean when our prisons are so full”.
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Overcrowding has been driven by successive governments increasing sentences, experts say. Private prisons can be particularly “overcrowded, dangerous and violent”, Hobbs argued, while the drive to make a profit creates “an additional, unnecessary squeeze on a system in crisis”.
Of the 14 privately run prisons assessed for safety and support services by HM Prison and Probation Service in the year to March, over half were rated of “concern” or “serious concern” and none were considered “outstanding”.
In May, the government announced it would permanently take over the running of HMP Lowdham Grange prison in Nottingham, which only last year had transferred from Serco to Sodexo. A damning independent report later criticised a chaotic handover between the private companies, identifying six deaths in custody over a one-year period and the highest number of weapons ever found in a single search in any prison.
Simpson said that “Lowdham Grange has to be looked at very much in a bubble that is not a reflection of anything else that we do”.
He added that Sodexo had “really felt the push” from Timpson, when he chaired the Prison Reform Trust, to improve opportunities for prison leavers. The company was now taking “hold of its social responsibility agenda”, he said.
