Author: Norbert Flasko

Timpson works with prisons to turn around lives

The need to make prisons places of hard work and meaningful employment is set out in the Government’s new Green Paper on justice reform.

Prison Industries are meeting the challenge by linking up with companies in the private sector.

One of these is Timpson – the UK’s largest shoe repairer, key cutter, engraver and watch repairer. Timpson’s 2,400-strong workforce includes 89 ex-offenders who trained at the company’s prison workshops.

James Timpson is Managing Director of Timpson, and believes that prison works for his company as well as for the former prisoners on his payroll. And as a result, he’s always looking for his next ‘superstar’ employee.

‘I find the staff we’ve recruited from prisons are among the best colleagues we’ve got,’ James says. ‘We see this as a great way of not only helping people but of getting people to work for us.

‘We simply recruit people who we feel deserve a chance,’ he adds. ‘I think the best way to avoid people going back to prison is to give them a good job.’

Training on the job

James’ relationship with Prison Industries started eight years ago when he recruited a young offender who impressed him during a visit to HMYOI Thorn Cross.

‘When he was released I gave him a trial and he’s been with us ever since and now ex-offenders make up about four per cent of our staff,’ he says.

Since then, James has worked with prison industries to set up special training workshops for offenders. A workshop opened two years ago at HMP Liverpool and it’s been a great success.

‘Today we have 12-14 prisoners being trained there at any one time, and on release we guarantee them a trial period with Timpson,’ James explains. ‘In 2009 we opened a second Timpson workshop at HMP Wandsworth, which like Liverpool operates every weekday. We also have a prison industry at HMP Forest Bank, where prisoners do welting, which is part of the shoe repair process.’

And does he feel these workshops have been successful so far?

‘Well, 75 per cent of staff who join us from prison are still with us after six months. We’ve got shops everywhere – 900 across the country – so we’re very flexible about where people work. Some prisoners want to work in their home areas, while others want to be far away from where they come from, and we have the flexibility to help in both circumstances.’

Room for expansion

The success of the workshops has led to plans to train prisoners in other areas of the Timpson empire.

A photo processing business as part of the Max Spielmann chain (owned by Timpson) at women’s prison HMP New Hall has already been approved and is in the planning stages. It will give the women who take part confidence and skills, and as in male prison workshops, they will be offered a trial job on release.

‘The business is growing very quickly so I always have room for more staff,’ James says.

‘I’m starting to recruit ex-offenders for other retailers as well, so in the future all the jobs might not be for us specifically, but we’ll still be providing jobs in retail. I think the whole corporate agenda is moving towards this approach. Social enterprise is now becoming much more relevant, it’s seen as something that’s good for the business, but also good for society.’

Success stories

In the eight years he’s been involved in working with prison industries, James admits there have been some hiccups.

‘We’ve had to let people go sometimes – we give people a chance but we don’t take any messing,’ he says.

But the cases that don’t work out are clearly outweighed by those that do. He cites the example of an ex-offender from Liverpool who had never worked in his life and had problems with drugs and alcohol.
‘He was 47, and had been in prison for 28 years on and off. He’s been with us for two years, and he keeps his monthly pay slips on a board to show the months he’s been out of prison. He’s great.’

Ex-offender Sarah is another shining example of how employment can help rehabilitate offenders.

‘She served a five year sentence before joining us, then became runner up in our Apprentice of the Year 2009 competition,’ James says. ‘She’s about to start managing a shop and everyone thinks she’s absolutely wonderful.’

And with successes stories like this behind him, James believes his business contemporaries would do well to join forces with Prison Industries.

‘I would say that if you’re in the business of wanting good people to work for you, you would be wise to look for talent in strange places, and one of those places may be prisons because from our experience, we’ve found lots of superstars there.’

How we reduce reoffending to improve public safety is going to change. Have your say in the Green Paper consultation: ‘Breaking the cycle: effective punishment, rehabilitation and sentencing of offenders.’

Timpson has key to giving ex-convicts second chance

Prison Training Academies

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World’s largest child porn bust

100s arrested, ringleader charged after feds crack dark web bitcoin transactions.

A South Korean man has been charged with running the largest-ever dark web child porn ring, hosting nearly eight terabytes of vile videos depicting sexual exploitation of children and infants. Hundreds of users have been arrested.

Jong Woo Son is facing multiple federal child porn charges for running a massive trove of child sexual exploitation that investigators have called the “world’s largest dark web child porn marketplace,” a nine-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday has revealed. The charges include advertising and distributing child porn as well as money laundering.

US federal investigators were able to trace the site to Son’s home thanks to a computer glitch that revealed his IP address. Servers that were home to some 200,000 different videos, uploaded by members of the site in exchange for “points” allowing them to view more of the depraved content, were kept in his own bedroom.

Browsers hunting for legal porn were warned away with a red-lettered notice on the site’s front page: “Do not upload adult porn.” The site’s location on the dark web meant accidental viewers were unlikely, as it could only be accessed with the exact address. Users paid for the abhorrent clips in points they bought with Bitcoin, which – despite its reputation for anonymity – helped investigators track them down.

“You may try to hide behind technology, but we will find you and arrest you and prosecute you,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie Liu said during a press conference on Wednesday.

“The scale of this crime is eye-popping and sickening,” John Fort, chief of IRS criminal investigations, told reporters, crediting “our agency’s ability to analyze the blockchain and de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions” with the “identification of hundreds of predators around the world.”

Among the hundreds of suspects arrested since the site’s seizure in March 2018 were several former US government employees. Richard Gratkowski, a former Homeland Security Investigations agent, was sentenced to 70 months in prison in May, after using his own government passport as identification to open an account with Bitcoin wallet company Coinbase, which he used to pay for his sick entertainment. 

US Army veteran Stephen Langlois received 42 months in prison that same month for downloading 114 videos. Another unidentified former federal law enforcement agent had the equivalent of 50 hours of child porn footage downloaded from the site. 

South Korean authorities have arrested over 300 suspects in addition to Son, noting that most were unmarried office workers in their 20s, though some had sex crimes on their record. UK authorities have also nabbed some of the site’s users, including one man sentenced to 22 years in prison in March for repeatedly abusing two young children and uploading the footage to Welcome to Video. 

Investigators from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children examining the footage were shocked to find that nearly half of it had not previously been encountered and depicted children unknown to authorities.

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Before the Law by Franz Kafka

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.

A Second Chance

This 90-minute feature documentary accompanies two serving prisoners on their journeys through a unique training programme – each with a genuine chance of employment on their release.

These journeys are punctuated by encounters with four former prisoners, now Timpson and Max Spielmann employees, who have embraced the world of work and are now living normally outside the walls.

How do you turn your life around when you’ve been written off by society? This is the challenge faced by all prisoners – men and women, career criminals as well as first-timers – who find themselves marginalized and stigmatized on leaving jail.

Providing a unique glimpse of lives regained, this film documents the importance of a second chance through employment and tells the heart-breaking and uplifting stories of prisoners trying to transform their lives.

This is a film about hope.

Official Website

Homelessness and the penal system

The new prisons minister, Robert Buckland MP, recently replied to a Parliamentary Question from Richard Burgon MP, the shadow justice secretary, concerning the number of people received into prison who are homeless. This was interesting because most debate has centred around people being homeless on release from prison, which is, of course, still a major problem.

The response was staggering. The number of people known to be of no fixed abode when they were received into the 51 prisons listed increased from 18,493 in 2015 to 23,488 in 2018. This includes men and women but excludes children. The figures will include people remanded to prison by the courts and those who are sentenced.

Bizarrely, some big prisons that receive from the courts were missing from the list and the total number of homeless people sent to prison is undoubtedly even greater than the information provided by the minister.

Missing from the list were 73 prisons. Most of them do not receive people from the courts, or indeed the streets, because they are high security or training prisons; nevertheless prisons like Wormwood Scrubs and Preston were missing. This means that the full picture of how prisons are being used to sweep up the homeless is not clear and is being under-counted.

We do not know how many children and women who are homeless are being sent to prison. Missing from the list are prisons like Styal, which holds women, and Feltham, which holds children.

I have always argued that the penal system is used to sweep up the poor; now it seems we have definite proof. As the cuts in funding for local government have sliced into services for people with addiction, health, mental health problems the number of the homeless has increased exponentially. They are forced into petty crime to survive.

Spend a few hours in any magistrates courts and you will be transported back to the eighteenth century. The shock is that anyone thinks that this is humane, and it certainly is not economically efficient.

This week an Urgent Notification was issued to Bristol prison because it is in such dire state. Hidden in the litany of failures the inspector noted that almost half the men released from the prison were homeless.

The government admitted that, of the 6,000 women released from prison in 2017/8, only just over a half had settled accommodation, 240 were known to be going to rough sleeping and 831 women were ‘other homeless’. Nothing was known about 778 women released from prisons. Inspectors have noted that prisons have given sleeping bags and tents to men and women released from prison.

People who are homeless are being swept into prison and then dumped back onto the streets. Prisons are a merry-go-round for the people too poor and too fragile to sort their lives out. But instead of providing support, we are spending billions every year policing them, criminalising them and incarcerating them.

There is a chink of light. Overwhelmingly these are the people who are given short sentences by the courts. The government is planning to consult on its plan to get rid of short prison sentences. Let’s hope that this happens expeditiously and that we can close down some of the prisons holding the homeless so that funding is diverted to the local services that would prevent anti-social behaviour and support people to live healthier, happier lives.

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‘Help Me Please’: Terror, Trauma and Self-Inflicted Deaths in Prison

The Criminal and Social Justice Research Cluster, School of Social Work and Social Policy, University of Strathclyde, in association with SCCJR, are hosting a public lecture delivered by Professor Joe Sim, of Liverpool John Moores University. Doors open at 4:30pm and a light buffet is provided. The lecture will commence at 5.30pm and will be followed by a Question and Answer session, and a wine reception.

Title: ‘Help Me Please’: Terror, Trauma and Self-Inflicted Deaths in Prison

Abstract: Tony Paine wrote the words ‘Help Me Please’ in a letter to his mother before he killed himself in Liverpool prison in February 2018. Figures compiled by the charity INQUEST indicate that Tony’s death was one of 245 prison deaths that occurred in England and Wales between January and October 2018, 65 of which were self-inflicted Altogether, between 1990 and September 2019, nearly 5000 prisoners died in prisons in England and Wales. Over 2100 of these deaths were self-inflicted.

This lecture critically examines this issue from an abolitionist theoretical and political perspective. In doing so, it raises a number of critical questions concerning the nature of life, death and state violence. First, it focuses on the dehumanizing nature of the prison environment, and the brutal exercise of penal power, which provide the psychologically corrosive context in which individuals choose to kill themselves. Second, it challenges the state’s definition of reality with its emphasis on the pathological nature of the individuals who kill themselves. Third, it argues that it is not only the physical violence of the state that kills but also the systemic indifference by state servants can also induce deaths in prison. Fourth, it critiques the state’s definition of dangerousness by asking for whom is the prison dangerous? Finally, it concludes by focusing on the lack of democratic accountability and the culture of state immunity and impunity that underpins these deaths and asks what should be done to hold to account those responsible for them?

Biography: Joe Sim is Professor of Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University. He was a member of the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties and is currently a Trustee of the charity INQUEST which campaigns around the slogan ‘truth, justice and accountability’ in relation to state-related deaths or where wider issues of state and corporate accountability are in question, including Hillsborough and Grenfell. He is the author of Punishment and Prisons, Medical Power in Prisons, Prisons Under Protest (with Phil Scraton and Paula Skidmore) and British Prisons (with Mike Fitzgerald).

I’m looking forward to this lecture.

What is Anti-social behaviour?

Anti-social behaviour covers a wide range of unacceptable activity that causes harm to an individual, to their community or to their environment. This could be an action by someone else that leaves you feeling alarmed, harassed or distressed. It also includes fear of crime or concern for public safety, public disorder or public nuisance.

Examples of anti-social behaviour include:

  • Nuisance, rowdy or inconsiderate neighbours
  • Vandalism, graffiti and fly-posting
  • Street drinking
  • Environmental damage including littering, dumping of rubbish and abandonment of cars
  • Prostitution related activity
  • Begging and vagrancy
  • Fireworks misuse
  • Inconsiderate or inappropriate use of vehicles

The police, local authorities and other community safety partner agencies, such as Fire & Rescue and social housing landlords, all have a responsibility to deal with anti-social behaviour and to help people who are suffering from it.

If you are experiencing problems with anti-social behaviour, or have any concerns about it, or other community safety issues, you should contact your local council or call the non-emergency number, 101. In an emergency, call 999.

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