This is a CTP of initiative: Fair Shares (UK)
This CTP describes a partnership that emerged between the Fair Shares Time Bank in Gloucester and the local HM Prison around the project, “Timebanking in Prison”. Inspired by reports of a similar scheme in the US, Martin Simon of Fair Shares and a probation officer, Keith Barrett, approached HM Prison Gloucester with the idea to bring timebanking into the prison community. The initial aim of the project was to bring timebanking to inmates to enable them to engage with their families and their former local communities. This represented an experiment involving new ways of doing in the criminal justice system based around offering ways of re-connecting prisoners with their families and communities, repairing and improving interpersonal relations and relations among offenders, between offenders and their families and between offenders’ families and their communities.
The project involved inmates repairing bicycles and was established on a values-based model that offered win-win opportunities for all stakeholders. Old bicycles were donated to the project by the vacation and recreation company, Centre Parks. The renovated bicycles were destined for future use in a range of contexts; one such context was to provide health workers in West Africa (the Gambia) with bicycles to enable them to make field visits more easily. Other uses were within the Fair Shares time bank, with child and teenage members able to exchange time credits for a bicycle. Other bicycles were distributed to partner civil society organizations. These end uses for the bicycles were intended to enhance the restorative justice element of the project, enabling inmates to feel their work could compensate for damage inflicted through previous offending and might support and incentivise other vulnerable persons at risk of offending, such as local youth, into positive behaviours by encouraging their participation in time banking activities. The restorative justice element of the project provided another motivation for inmates.
Inmates earned time credits for hours spent repairing bicycles. Instead of using these credits for themselves, the credits were donated by them to their families, allowing them to receive an hour of help from community Time Bank members. This was intended to help inmates maintain links with the families and enable them to support their families even from prison. It also enabled families of prisoners to become better integrated into their local communities.
As the families of inmates in Gloucester prison often lived far from Gloucester, Fair Shares collaborated with other Time Banks across the country to ensure that families and communities could be supported by the project, irrespective of where families lived. Owing to gaps in the national timebanking network, this was not possible for every prisoner. Also some inmates preferred to donate their credits to charity. As an alternative option, therefore, a ‘Good Will Pot’ (Community Chest) was established, which was used by inmates to support those needing services from the local time bank but who were too frail, infirm or aged to earn time credits themselves.
The project worked on a daily basis with a contact person in the prison recording hours and passing the information to the time broker at Fair Shares on a monthly basis. In addition, regular visits from the time broker offered opportunity to discuss inmates’ progress and make any needed corrections in the project design.
In a later phase of the project, the time bank obtained video and audio equipment and the project was extended to enable inmates to record themselves reading bedtime stories. The recordings could be sent to their families, enabling inmates and their children to better keep in touch. Inmates could use time credits for recording time. A second “Good Will Pot” was established, especially for other prisoners that were not able to earn time credits themselves, so they, too, could benefit from the scheme.
The aim of the project was to maintain or build bridges between inmates, their families, their communities and wider civic life. The project also offered inmates a means of restorative justice not by repaying specific victims of crimes, but more generally by contributing to society. In addition, inmates learned new skills and had opportunities to work toward new goals. Certificates were awarded to recognise significant contributions in terms of hours of time contributed and for specific skills learned. This contributed to prisoners’ self-esteem and provided a basis for obtaining references, preparing them for life after release. Opportunity was provided also for prisoners to continue their membership of the time bank after being released, which allowed continuing support and a faster re-integration into the local community.
The project was successful. This appeared to provide a breakthrough. A wider demonstration project was conducted. Other prison governors expressed interest in extending the project to their prisons. However, resistance was met from prison warders. For lack of their (critical) support, the scheme was never extended. In 2013, HM Prison Gloucester closed as part of government rationalization policies, marking the end of the partnership.
Fair Shares continues to operate small projects in the area of criminal justice, but the ambitions and expectations that successful pilots and demonstrations would lead on naturally to the scaling up of successful activity have been frustrated.
The partnership between HM Prison Gloucester and the Fair Shares Time Bank came to realization as Martin Simon (the founder of Fair Shares) had known Keith Barrett, a probation officer at Gloucester Prison. Coincidentally, during a conversation, they happened to “start talking about Edgar Cahn’s book ‘No more throw away people’. There is a line in there where he talks about prisoners writing letters to their family and getting time credits for it. It really sparked us off and we started off the whole idea of Gloucester prison.” There was, therefore, no initial intention to develop this project. The project emerged through a happenstance conversation and a set of happenstantial but supportive contextual circumstances.
Keith Barrett, the probation officer arranged contact and communication between Fair Shares and HM Prison Gloucester and played an important role in realizing the “Timebanking in Prison” project, as networking and institutional commitment was necessary to implement it successfully. Particularly, the local context and social networks were decisive for the success. Martin Simon emphasized that “a unique group of people had to come together with the energy for setting it up.” The context and people involved offered a special opportunity and “released very positive dynamics that facilitated this achievement.”
The project was heavily supported by the Jole Rider charity, which is an education organization focussed on improving the lives of children. Through the project they provided bicycles to health workers in Gambia to enable them to reach patients and to children in isolated, rural villages to enable them to get to school. Fair Shares financed bike stands, paint and parts and the Jole Rider charity provided old bikes, which could be renovated. Many of these came from Centre Parks.
The extension of the project in terms of allowing prisoners to record stories or letters for their families was facilitated by the charity, Storybook Dads. This charity offers the opportunity for imprisoned parents to record CDs or DVDs of themselves reading bed time stories for their children or otherwise supporting their child’s education, with the aim of contributing to lowering the rates of re-offending. This is in the context where: “50% of all prisoners lose contact with their families and those that maintain contact are up to 6 times less likely to re-offend.”
Through the project other partnerships were made with The Shannon Trust and the Samaritans. These facilitated further prison-based projects to which inmates were allowed to contribute by offering time.
Important related events include the interest and support to the project offered by a set of charities and foundations and the earlier development by some of these of related ideas, such as using bicycle repair and restoration as a vehicle for timebanking activity or using the storybook approach as a motivation and reward for time credits that could be included in the project alongside the timebanking mechanism. An important related event was the closure of HM Prison Gloucester in 2013, which marked the end of a highly successful project that had support for replication and extension from the top levels of prison governors, but not from warders.
Although, the implementation of the “Timebanking in Prison” project in Gloucester was not openly contested, attempts to implement the project in other prisons were frustrated, as implementation depends on warder support, and this was not forthcoming. In contrast to the local context of Gloucester prison, where staff were favourably disposed to the scheme and supported it, members of staff in other prisons were reluctant to integrate timebanking into their daily operation, perhaps because this involves procedures that go beyond their usual work routine and cultural norms.
The decisiveness of institutional support to co-produce such a project is emphasized by Martin Simon. The project aroused “tremendous interest […] Everything from the top level was 100 % positive [but] then you had the prison wardens and they said ‘What is this?’ We grew that relationship [with Gloucester prison] over several years. You need to have the relationships. The people really have to believe in it and in relation to their everyday experiences in life; especially the prison wardens.”
Extension of the project failed due to lack of institutional commitment. In the case of HM Prison Gloucester, there was a lead contact person. This person proved indispensable to facilitate communication with other prison staff, for example to clarify that collaboration on such a project would not increase the work load, which was expected generally by sceptical prison staff.
Prison wardens are often not in favour of additional programs that do not guarantee any measureable benefit, as governmental requirements and tightly-defined budgets have to be met. Further, such projects come with high risks of being seen (from the outside) as inconsistent with received ideas about prisons existing to punish offenders, rather than to rehabilitate them or reintegrate them into family and community life.
The project was not anticipated. However, once the idea had emerged, plans were developed for implementing the project and developing partnerships with other foundations, charities and civil society organizations in order to carry it through. The idea of timebanking being a values-based activity that emphasises inclusion and that everyone has something to contribute is consistent with the idea of integrating offenders into timebanking and enabling them to become assets forging new interpersonal relations and re-connecting offenders with family and community.
The successful implementation in the case of the HM Prison Gloucester was anticipated and planned for insofar as relationships between the institutions and involved persons were carefully grown and maintained during the years of cooperation. However, the extent of resistance to project extension to other prisons – accepting new ways of doing – was not anticipated, especially given that the project was successful in Gloucester and had high-level support from other prison governors. Despite the positive feedback and results of the ‘timebanking in prison’ project, the scheme has not been replicated to any substantial degree and with the closure of the prison where the project was successfully pioneered, the main venue for the project was lost. The anticipated ‘breakthrough’ never materialised.
During the nine years of project operation several challenges occurred and led to changes in project aims and other refinements. The project was also refined through experimentation on a learning-by-doing basis. Initially the aim was to enable prisoners to engage with their families by supporting them while serving their prison sentence through donating time credits. However, as the UK has a specific system for allocating prisoners to prisons, a spatial link to the final prison is not guaranteed. The severity of the committed crime and the risk of escape determine the final assignment to a prison. HM Prison Gloucester was a prison of category B (for those prisoners who do not require maximum security, but who constitute a higher risk of escaping) and therefore inmates were assigned from all over the country.
The shift in the initial mission with priority on family support rather than general community contribution was due to the circumstances that not all participating inmates originated from areas where they could provide their families with time credits due to a lack of operating Time Banks in some areas. The ‘Good Will Pot’ was established to provide opportunity for the local inmates to contribute to the local community. A second ‘pot’ was then implemented for prisoners who could not participate in the project. The close collaboration and effective communication between participants, the staff at HM Prison Gloucester and the time broker allowed the project design to be adapted as needs and conditioning factors became clearer.
Fair Shares searched for other prisons in the area to start a follow-up project after the closure of HM Prison Gloucester. Connections were made with HM Prison Leyhill. However the context there was found to be completely different. The Leyhill prison is an open (Category D) prison, so in-mates there already had more opportunities for interaction with relatives and their communities than had inmates in HM Prison Gloucester. According to Martin Simon a couple of private youth offending units took over the approach but, despite the positive results achieved in Gloucester, the project was not up-scaled or replicated. The learning achieved was that it takes more than a successful demonstration project for a good idea and a good project to be replicated.
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