Workshop helps build a future for inmates

Les Nicolles is already ranked as having a very low reoffending rate, with only 13% of inmates returning, but the prison is active in its efforts to help all inmates in as many ways as possible in order to prepare them for life after they leave.

Upon entering the bright and spacious new facility for the Creative Learning in Prison scheme, the passionate attitude of each member of staff comes across and lends itself towards the engaging learning environment.

The workshop is furnished with a range of woodwork and metalwork machines, along with tools that allow creative craftsmanship for the inmates.

Acting prison governor John De Carteret said the scheme was about ‘tying up vocational skills, experience, qualifications [and] opportunities for jobs upon release. It’s also given people a sense of worth – what they’re doing is of worth to somebody.

‘I think it’s fair to say that the workshop and the work that we do down there is only one strand of everything that needs to be considered in the effective sentence planning of a prisoner,’ he said.

‘It’s important that the island community gets a sense of assurance that we are getting the best out of people and we are providing them with skills so that when they do get released, they take a positive role back in the community.’

Also with a passion for helping inmates adopt new skills, CLIP chairman Ian Stokes said that the scheme helped the prisoners ‘feel that they’re part of an engagement [and] part of a team’.

Regarding the variety of skills that are picked up through CLIP, he suggested that ‘social skills are as, if not more, important than the physical skills’ that are learnt.

When asked about the reaction from the prisoners, Mr Stokes said it was a gradual story, adding that the tone was set by the previous [prison] governor Dave Matthews.

With a strong belief concerning the development of the facility, Mr Stokes said that it had become a working prison ever since the appointment of Mr Matthews in 2012, and that the evolution of CLIP was a piggyback off that leadership.

Instead of being locked in their cells for most of the day, Mr Stokes said that the prisoners had since become actively engaged along with benefiting from the social upside of being responsible, punctual and part of a working team.

Mr Stokes also mentioned that the next part of the scheme was thinking outside the bubble of the prison, considering the future relationship between employers and inmates after they leave.

‘What’s not to like about a prisoner who leaves prison with a better opportunity to be a constructive member of the community?’ he said.

Read about the impact the programme had on one prisoner here.