The world was a very different place in October 2018 as I worked my final shift in the Prison Service. I was leaving a day-to-day reality of drug and alcohol fuelled violence, long working weeks surrounded by self-harm, mental health problems and sadly suicide on both sides of the thin grey line. Staffing pressures meant closed regimes, purposeful activity was the anti-clockwise walk around a litter infested yard, and summers meant protests and challenging conversations around association times and time outside. Nothing out of the ordinary if you are one of the thousands of Prison Officers throughout the UK that has become used to these working conditions. Also, not out of the ordinary if you are one of the 91,000 prisoners currently incarcerated or have spent time with me or those other staff over the last decade or so.
I had spent some considerable time privately studying and qualifying in a post graduate Health & Safety, law and liability Qualification. I was leaving the world of risk, high drama, mental and physical stress induced trauma and moving to the world of construction management. I was leaving a world where the norm was managing confrontation, running a regime with well under the required numbers of staff and trying desperately to squeeze several days’ worth of work into a few short hours, and moving to the world of construction. I was leaving a world where gang life was a consideration for everything you do, where being aware of everyone around you was critical to theirs and your safety, where several hundred people relied on you to keep them safe and guide them to the end of each day, just so you could start again the next, and I was moving to construction management, very different?
The Prison Service in 2018, was highly reportable for news outlets everywhere. Local press feasted on inspectorate reports being released almost daily. His Majesties Chief Inspectorate of Prisons measures prisons based on the four healthy prisons tests. Safety, Respect, Purposeful Activity and Rehabilitation and release planning. Sadly, a decade of staffing cuts, budget cuts to education and rehabilitation programming and several workforce modernisation streams had led to many prisons dramatically failing against all four of these outcomes. Essentially unsafe wings, with many prisoners locked up, little to no respect on both sides of the line and then being released only to return a short while later due to poor resettlement planning. It wasn’t safe for the prisons and certainly didn’t help communities.
So with all of this in mind, surely construction would offer a refreshing new way of life, full of hope and optimism, new beginnings. Surely a highly regulated industry whereby you must be qualified, competent and highly managed would be a positive for anyone looking to enter the industry. Well…Not quite!
A stat that is continuously published, but vitally important non the less is that male construction workers are now three times more likely to commit suicide than any other industry. Many will frown at this, but until you have worked directly in this world, as I have for almost five years now, it is hard to comprehend. Sites up and down the UK, are full of adult men & woman working hard, very hard. The culture is often brutal, an alpha male world of high testosterone and strong ideas. In almost all circumstances you can enter the industry without any prior background checks whatsoever, meaning many young workers find themselves looking over their shoulders. Organised crime and drug problems do exist.
The “Quick One” after work is culturally embedded, particularly for the many thousands working away from home. Friday and Saturday nights can be a blow out for the extreme hard-working weekdays, drug use only a few short hours before operating dangerous machinery is common without thorough testing procedures.
It is not all bad, the world of construction offers huge opportunities for people to earn, grow and learn vital skills for life. The country relays on these people to keep us moving, to keep the infrastructure going, our country depends on the construction industry. Change is happening, albeit slowly. Awareness is starting to generate some traction in terms of mental health and attitudes to safety are improving, however the two very different industries I have spoken about above, are not too different after all. There are huge similarities.
It has been very commonplace for prisons to throw CSCS cards at Prisoners in the hope they will leave custody and walk straight into a construction job the next day. That this will solve the issues within their offending pathways by ticking the employment box. It will tick the box, but I can be sure as sure is that doing just this will not help to prevent reoffending, support the individual to tackle their demons or “help them to lead law abiding lives” as the prison service code of conduct states.
We simply send them out of the frying pan, and into the fire.
The final healthy prison test is called Rehabilitation and release planning. Release planning means fully preparing prisoners for the world they are about to enter, not merely getting them there.
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