Network Rail are using convicts who are still serving time to help fix the railways. Apparently they are not involved in any safety-critical work and helps rehabilitate prisoners. Union bosses say this is at the expense of industry workers as prisoners are paid less. I’m not sure what I think about this. On the one hand I think most prisoners should work while serving time and earn their keep while in prison. On the other, with increasing over-crowding, perhaps cons will be another cheap solution to plugging the manual work labour-gap rather than utilising the long-term unemployed and getting them off benefits?
This story comes at a time when Network Rail have been criticised by the Prison Service for proposing to build an Engineering Yard right next to a Category A prison Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire. Prison officers are concerned about the noise irritation to the prisoners (many of whom are highly unstable) and the potential for them to cause serious problems if they were to get access to the yard. Presumably in a year or two they’ll all be employed to build it anyway.
Now why are they going building a new yard when several working yards such Eastleigh have recently closed? Eastleight Women’s Prison isn’t far.
I can’t see the problem with prisoners working for peanuts to repay some of their debt to society and to help with their rehabitilation for when they are released.
I’s be concerned if they were doing anything safety critical but in reality they have ben shoveling ballast, listing concrete sleepers and lugging tempory lighting for nighttime engineering work into and out of transit vans.