Are construction courses giving prisoners the tools to go straight?

In a drizzle-soaked yard, inside the grey stone Victorian walls of Cardiff Prison in Wales, men in yellow hi-vis jackets are putting interlocking concrete tiles on what looks like ten small dog kennels.

In fact, the structures are a practical classroom aid, designed to help prisoners learn the basics of roofing as part of a two-week intensive training course.

“The rigs are just 1.2 meters high and 1.2 meters wide so that we can see the guys all the time,” says Andy Bird, director of the GLA Group which specialises in teaching roofing courses to prisoners. “We can join the rigs together so we have much bigger roofs to work on but we can’t have them any higher because that could obscure our view of the guys completing the course and men’s safety is paramount.”

GLA’s roofing course at Cardiff prison. Photo: GLA

The two-week pitched roofing course runs through the very basics of roofing, installing concrete interlocking tiles, plain tiles and natural slates using traditional mortar methods as well as dry fix and ventilation systems.

Bird says the courses are frequently over-subscribed, something he puts down partly to the appeal of the subject and the delivery of the teaching, but also partly due to the appeal for prisoners spending six or seven hours a day in the open air, and, importantly, in all weathers. Courses usually run in cohorts of eight to ten, of which he says he expects all to attend each day.

As well as pitched roofing courses, the group also teaches courses on PVC single ply flat roofing, liquid plastic flat roofing and green initiatives - which covers solar PV, insulation and ‘living’ roofs and walls.

The Cardiff course has for the first time included a programme devised by the Lighthouse Construction Charity. The roofing course is designed to reintegrate prisoners into the workforce and to help bridge the worsening skills gap in the construction industry.

The Lighthouse Charity element is an e-learning section on soft skills training, covering subjects such as managing stress, understanding anxiety, resolving conflict and banter v bullying. The initiative also includes the opportunity for many of the participants to take on a paid job upon their release.

Skills shortage

“We’re always looking for skilled roofers,” says Ella Betambeau, HR officer at Central Group, a UK-based roofing and cladding contractor which is also involved in the initiative.

In September, Betambeau and her colleague Vicky Singleton, HR Manager, visited Cardiff prison to watch GLA’s training course for themselves and to speak to the participants. Since then, the company has received completed application forms and has spoken to four participants who have since been released from prison.

The company is keen to recruit labourers in its seven regions. Central says it offers a full comprehensive training package to all employees and is always looking to upskill staff and offer opportunities to progress to more skilled jobs such as an improver, fixer or foreman. Bird says that in some regions, skilled, experienced, self-employed roofers can make around £350 a day.

“We’re always really keen to give people a second chance to get their lives back on track,” says Betambeau. “We prefer to employ labourers directly because they tend to be more reliable. We sometimes struggle to find skilled labourers, so finding someone with a basic knowledge of roofing helps us.”

“Workers with certain convictions would be excluded from certain projects” she adds. “For example, we undertake projects at a lot of schools and hospitals; a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check is required for all workers on these sites. We only ever allow workers with the appropriate level of DBS checks to work on these premises.”

Andy Bird, director of the GLA Group which specialises in teaching roofing courses to prisoners. Photo: GLA

For Bird, a former roofer himself who started out in the industry in 1979 at the age of 16, the initiative provides a potential answer, both to helping people stay out of prison once their sentences have been completed – and providing training in the construction industry.

“We really are trying to make sure that we find employment opportunities that will be sustainable,” he says. “If they are in prison for something that pays them a lot of money, we need to find a way to inspire them, keeping them outside of prison and earning a regular decent wage.”

Earning good money

“Often, when they come out of prison these guys can get pushed into warehousing and or something similar, they’re going to work long hours but they’re never going to earn a lot of money.”

“Roofers can earn very good money, especially self-employed roofers who know what they are doing,” Bird says. “We try and educate them. We say, you’ve just spent two years of a four-year sentence in jail - look at the next two years as your apprenticeship. For the next two years instead of being stuck in here, concentrate on working hard as a labourer or a fixer and within two years, you will have moved on to something far better, so you won’t come back in here.”

On the other side of the coin, Bird says, the roofing industry in particular tends to suffer from a lack of training.

“The majority of roofers are self-employed and want to earn money. They don’t want to “waste” their time teaching their employees how to do the job properly. They want them to pick it up. And that’s one of the reasons that you have had such a high turnover of guys coming into the industry and leaving it because they don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Nobody’s taking the time to show them,” he says.

The initiative mirrors thousands of prison-based construction courses offered across correctional facilities around the world in which inmates are taught brick laying, plumbing or plastering as well as maths, English, horticulture or computer skills.

In most countries there is no national standard for what course of study inmates can pursue, often with prison governors able to choose for different providers. In the USA, the National Center for Construction Education & Research (NCCER) is the most frequently used. In Germany, prisons often directly employ so-called “masters of crafts” to teach specialised skills such as building and painting.

Bird says that the difference with this initiative is the support offered by the Lighthouse Charity and other stakeholders upon a prisoner’s release as well as the possibility of landing a job with a clear career progression at the end.

Nonetheless, when asked how many of the inmates who complete the course end up reoffending, Bird is pragmatic, “We can only do our best and offer a chance to those on the courses, obviously not everyone will take it,” he says.

Although there are no specific figures for his courses on reoffending rates, overall for those that come out of prison the statistics are stark.

HMP Cardiff inmates learn roofing skills. Image: Lighthouse Club/GLA Group

According to the UK’s Ministry of Justice, more than half of all adults released from a custodial sentence of less than a year end up reoffending within a year. In the US, two thirds of the people released from state and federal prisons are rearrested within three years of release.

Only Norway, which over the last 30 years has invested heavily in overhauling its entire prison and criminal justice system which focusses on rehabilitating prisoners has a recidivism rate of 20% after two years.

Bird says that a history of neglect, childhood trauma, undereducation, mental health and drug abuse issues, mean that in many cases inmates return to prison despite sometimes finding work

“For the first five courses we ran at Chelmsford Prison, we had a 40% success rate in getting the guys into jobs at the end,” he says. 

“One of the problems is that these guys have lots of bravado, but little confidence and this is something we try to change on the courses. No one has ever showed them an alternative pathway to tread.” he says. “Even a guy who’s in his mid-30s, it’s not too late to learn a trade that you can do for the next 20 or 30 years. Let’s train you up and give you the confidence to move forward not to keep going back.”

“Society has to do something to try to stop these guys reoffending,” he adds. “Some of the time, society fails - but that doesn’t mean we stop trying.”