Sustainability inside

A sustainable prison system – isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Kath Stathers takes an inside look.

What’s this about ‘greening the prison service’? Yes, it’s more than just a matter of setting inmates to work digging wildlife ponds up against the perimeter fence. Not that prisoners don’t dig out ponds, and provide labour on a range of other biodiversity schemes.

But forget the image of the chain gang – there’s no place for that in today’s more enlightened penal system. In fact these are the kind of work options that generally prove pretty popular. In most cases the results are something from which inmates get value too. Nor is it all nature and conservation stuff: environmental projects range from renewables to waste reduction, and the social dimension element of sustainability is often uppermost in the mind when prisons run schemes involving work in the local community.

But can you really do sustainability when you are doing time? In practice this is not one but two sets of questions. Answering the first would involve measuring – and mitigating – the impact of prisons and prison life on the environment.

The second – where there are fewer tangible measures – involves the impact of prison on people’s lives, both while they are inside and when they get out – their attitudes, their skills, their prospects of getting worthwhile jobs. A wide range of projects can nudge this impact, however slightly, towards sustainability – including all kinds of learning, from basic numeracy to solar panel installation, by way of creative writing courses for prisoners who want to write stories for their children.

Growing skills

Horticulture is one area where the therapeutic benefits are easy to imagine, if difficult to measure. A farm on site, as at Ford open prison near Arundel in Sussex, can also mean fresh produce for the prison kitchen, as well as the chance to learn a range of countryside management skills. “There’s no point training them to milk a cow if there’s no job for a dairyman outside,” says Phil Thomas, biodiversity and social issues manager for the Prison Service. “We’ve got schemes on dry stone walling and hedge laying, skills that are disappearing, so they’re crying out for them in the outside world.”

“We’ve got schemes on dry stone walling and hedge laying, skills they’re crying out for in the outside world.”

At Ford they offer an NVQ level 1 in horticulture, the kind of skill that can readily be transferred to nurseries and garden centres after prison. “We’ve had some successes in the past,” says manager Chris Marsden, “with prisoners going on to work on golf courses and one who went to Chichester Cathedral. Those are the ones we know about.

Most get out of this place and never want to think about it again, so don’t contact us.” Even the man at Chichester really only kept in touch because he was buying the Cathedral’s bedding plants from the prison; they lost contact when he moved on to another job. An open prison out in the country is one thing, but prisons in urban locations also often have gardens with features designed to encourage wildlife.

There are bird feeders, nesting boxes and bee- and butterfly-attracting plants at Holloway women’s prison in north London. Some closed prisons have ponds on the inside, like the one at the lifers’ Kingston prison in Portsmouth, complete with breeding ducks. Other ponds are definitely off limits, protected by barbed wire – but all the more valuable from the pure biodiversity perspective.

The prison estate covers around 15,000 acres in total, and Thomas, wearing his biodiversity hat, is currently looking at all 137 sites to make sure such opportunities are exploited to the full. The handful whose grounds include sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), or nationally important arboretums, need detailed biodiversity action plans covering those particular habitats and species. But even the less specialist sites are getting simplified management plans. “We’re working with English Nature, the Wildlife Trust and the RSPB to look at how not to damage areas, how to protect them and how to enhance them as well,” says Thomas.

Not going to waste

Mike Jarvis, the sustainable development co-ordinator for the Prison Service, was put in charge of ‘greening’ policy five years ago and has been impressed by the enthusiasm of prison governors keen to get schemes going on their patch. He started out expecting to have to go softly, softly, to avoid scaring people off with prescriptive instructions from on high, but instead found governors ringing him, asking how to set up a committee for this, or what to do to take it forward. “Without much prompting from us, these establishments introduced all sorts of initiatives,” he says.

They do get plenty of backup. A quarterly newsletter, Greening Matters, disseminates information through-out the service; there’s an annual conference, and Jarvis gives regular presentations at individual prisons. Jarvis is full of enthusiasm for the future, too.

“I want to look at putting in combined heat and power units. And at increasing the rainwater recovery programme to take in more prisons. Then we need to look at alternatively fuelled fleet vehicles – we’re not doing enough for transport at the moment.

I’m going to introduce service-wide rules about the disposal of cooking oil....” The prison service’s first wind turbine is now in the procurement phase for a prison in Cumbria, while Cardiff prison already has one of Europe’s biggest solar water heating installations on the roof of its laundry. The prison service’s sustainable development report is full of conservation schemes, waste management schemes, prison laundries where the water from the last rinse is used for the first wash of the next load.

Some prisons specialise in mending fridges and washing machines, thereby stopping them from swelling the mountains of discarded white goods; while others turn waste paper into animal bedding to supply local pet shops. More often than not, prisons now have environmental managers, and Jarvis reckons that maybe 90% have some sort of environmental initiative. Often these are inspired by projects in other UK prisons; as he says, “although it’s a big estate, it’s a small world”.

One much-copied initiative is the waste management unit at HMP Sudbury, which collects rubbish every day from around the prison, the kitchens, the residential wings, the offices and the furniture and shoemaking workshops. It’s all then sorted, by seven prisoners overseen by unit manager Terry Minshall. Clothing is mended, sent to the laundry and reissued.

Useful wood is returned to the furniture workshop, the rest sold as firewood or used to fuel the boiler that heats the recycling workshop. Kitchen peelings are composted and eventually dug back into the prison’s 43-acre market garden. Paper, card and metal is sold on, but plastic bottles, sadly, don’t pay their way – the lack of recycling facilities in this country means that the prison has to pay to have them taken away and shipped to Taiwan for recycling.

With only 35% now going to landfill, Sudbury’s efforts on waste reduction have cut the need for council collections to one per month. This means they don’t have to open the prison gates nearly so often – a costly operation that prisons are understandably keen to avoid wherever possible, with all its security implications. A similar scheme introduced at Wetherby Young Offenders Institute last October is projected to save £52,000 over a full year.

And if the impetus isn’t coming just from a desire to save the planet, so what? As Jarvis comments pragmatically, “if saving money or increasing security can encourage prisons to develop sustainable initiatives, then it’s only a good thing&rdquo

Among the 25 waste management units now up and running in our prisons, several have taken their practice that bit further, offering qualifications in waste management to the prisoners who work in them, and so neatly combining two areas of the sustainability agenda – waste management and the ‘from custody to work’ programme. So far over 80 prisoners have gained one or other of the two certificates accredited by the Chartered Institute of Waste Management for which they are eligible; three are now studying environmental science at degree level while still in prison, and one has gone on to Salford University following his release.

Community benefit

Opportunities for prisoners to work within a local community are something of a holy grail for the concept of reintegration into society in a sustainable way. “Being part of a community definitely helps prisoners,” says Jarvis, an idea which seems almost self-evident, though there’s not much concrete research to back it up. It’s particularly hard to assess how far the idea of making reparation, by putting something back into the community, is a big motivator for participants.

But, at the very least, volunteering for such schemes offers a break from routine. You can see why prisoners from Haverigg in Cumbria might volunteer to work with EnCams (previously the Tidy Britain Group) collecting and recording litter from the beach. In other schemes, prisoners work with charities to recondition bicycles or wheelchairs, which the charities can then redistribute to those in need. Where working in the community is part of a resettlement programme for longer serving prisoners, there is evidence that those who go through the whole programme – progressing from voluntary to paid work in the community – do have lower re-offending rates. Sustainability from the inside out, you might say.

Building for the future

You might think that the rapidly expanding prison population would lead to buildings being put up fast and on the cheap. But Jarvis is adamant this isn’t the case. “They are put up fast, but all new buildings are put up to last 60 years. And, as we all know from experience, that means they’ll be standing far longer than that.”

Current designs follow guidelines of sustainable practice, using natural light and ventilation as far as possible. Construction is done to minimise waste, and all new prison-building projects now have an environmental advisor, who’s present throughout the planning and building process.

Kath Stathers is a freelance journalist.

7 September 2004

Kath Stathers