Private Prison Labour-Rehabilitation or Entrapment in Poverty? Prisoners’ views

What is it about?

The paper examines prisoners attitudes towards doing work for private companies. We found that the majority of prisoners were pessimistic about the rehabilitative potential of this work; they felt that it was monotonous, lacked skill and did not prepare them for employment after prison. When rehabilitation is not realised in prison work, it instead performs a particularly exploitative role, arguably reinforcing prisoners’ negative attitudes towards work that is of very low skill and offers extremely poor prospects in the world outside prison. Failing to take the opportunity to design rehabilitative activities into private prison work risks perpetuating prisoners toxic cycle of illegal activity and entrapping them in different forms of ‘invisibility’.

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Why is it important?

The article explores the rehabilitative potential of private sector work undertaken by prisoners in a private sector prison, with implications for the nature of poor quality work in the external labour market.