ABSTRACT
Over the last two centuries many ideas have been put forward as purposes for prison work. We saw in Chapter 1 that at different times work in prisons has been valued in terms of: teaching prisoners the virtues of labour; their moral regeneration; softening the pains of confinement; maintaining prisons; enabling them to run commercial enterprises with cheap labour, or at least to keep down their own costs; building public works; punishment and deterrence; control and discipline; imparting vocational skills; instilling work habits; ‘treatment and training’; and simply keeping prisoners occupied. From time to time official inquiries have been held into prison work or into the whole prison system; the subject of work for prisoners has been carried along and swirled about by the changing currents of penal philosophy. Meanwhile prison staff have had to run prisons, and prisoners have had to do the work allotted to them. Over thirty years ago Cooper and King1
concluded from empirical research that the aims of prison work in Britain were confused. The results of the exercise we reported in Chapter 4 (pp.123-6) suggest that this confusion still exists.
