‘I do enjoy the work,but I think the wages in the jails are shocking’: Analysing prisoner wages as a pain of imprisonment using Foucault's artifice

Abstract

Until now, wages in prison and the meanings associated with them have been relatively overlooked within penology. This study analyses findings from a research project conducted between 2019 and 2021 that explores multiple meanings attached to prisoner wages. Through the analysis of 29 semi-structured interviews were conducted with a cohort of purposely selected people in custody across three prisons in Scotland, this study provides unique and rich insights into prison wages. Themes analysed include comments relating to wage rates and what emerges as a particularly tenuous link between wages within and outside prison. Receiving a weekly wage close to the hourly UK minimum wage was seen as an integral part of the life in prison and compounded feelings of detachment to life outside of prison. Our findings also indicate that sentiments associated with prison wages are significantly shaped by pre-prison experience of wages. The impact of imprisonment in relation to prison wages are stratified by income, given the differences in experience related to pre-prison employment and wage levels. Our paper also situates prison wages within a wider context through engaging with Foucault's notion of ‘artifice’ which served to develop an understanding of the logic behind the low levels of remuneration for prison work. Our study has relevance in all prison jurisdictions where people in custody receive wages significantly less than local minimum wage legislation or sectoral tariffs would normally dictate.

Keywords

Prisoner wages work within prison Foucault’s artifice

Introduction

While prison wages have been described in a range of studies (Haney, 2010; Maiwurm and Maiwurm, 1973; Quigley, 2003), there has been very limited analysis of the views of people in custody about the wages they earn within prison. Our study is the first to explicity analyse the meanings and associations people in custody have with prison wages, within the Scottish prison estate. This is a setting within which weekly wages are quite close to hourly minimum wage levels in the community.¹ Although minimum wage policies exist in over 100 countries globally (Neumark et al., 2008), there emerges a significant divergence in how much these influence wages within prisons globally, if at all. To an extent, our paper builds on previous analysis of the pains and frustrations of imprisonment (Sykes, 1958), and extends this analysis into the under-analysed area of wages within prison:

Whatever may be the pains of imprisonment, then, in the custodial institution of today, we must explore the way in which the deprivations and frustrations pose profound threats to the inmate's personality or sense of personal worth. (Sykes, 1958: 64, emphasis added)

It could be suggested that the level of prison wages in Scotland constitutes a pain for some of our participants and more of a frustration associated with imprisonment for other participants, with the level of wages resulting in constricted consumption, difficult economic choices and often negative consequences for family members. However, the theoretical contribution of such analysis would likely be constrained to the widely utilised ‘identification’ and ‘categorisation’ of pains highlighted by Haggerty and Bucerius (2020). Therefore, our paper more substantively engages with Foucault's notion of ‘artifice’ to analyse the motivations and rationales behind such pains and frustrations.

Prison wages in context

When one considers some of the more prominent studies of everyday life within prison, prison wages tend not to be a consistent feature. This is surprising given that wages and the consumption that wages facilitate, are often a significant focus of discussion both within custody and within community settings more widely (Hicks, 1963; Piore, 1973). While wages have not been a significant focus in the principal studies of prison life, they have been discussed to an extent. For example, Sykes states:

The wages of the inmate are fixed by the State Board of Control within a range of 10 cents to 35 cents per day, depending on his assignment, and this munificence is hardly calculated to stir the inmate to heights of effort. (Sykes, 1958: 29)

Here we get limited insight into the perceptions of these wages for the people in custody at the New Jersey State Maximum Security Prison, or the rationale for how these levels of pay were arrived at. In a recent sociological study of life in prison at HMP Wellingborough (an English Category C men's prison), Crewe also does not analyse the meanings and associations attached to wages in prison:

Wages varied from £5 to £16 per week, with the most being offered for kitchen jobs, followed by trolley repair. Prisoners were able to spend private cash of between £5 and £15 per week, depending on their privilege level. (Crewe, 2009: 32)

Although Crewe subsequently explores the implications of wages providing greater incentives for menial work over educational activities (ibid, 45). Foucault more directly considers the meanings of wages within prison in a number of places within Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, wages are central to the experience of prison and constitute an ‘artifice’:

The labour by which the convict contributes to his own needs turns the thief into a docile worker. This is the utility of remuneration for penal labour; it imposes on the convict the ‘moral’ form of wages as the condition of his existence…. The wages of penal labour do not reward production; they function as a motive and measure of individual transformation: it is a legal fiction, since it does not represent the ‘free’ granting of labour power, but an artifice that is presumed to be effective in the techniques of correction. (Foucault, 1977: 243)

Here Foucault outlines some of the ways in which prison wages contribute to the moral world of the prison, in so far as wages represent compliance with the prison regime; compliance attained in this instance through work. Put crudely, prisoners do not receive payment because they are working but, instead, they are working because the work itself (and the ‘moral form of wages’) is useful as a disciplinary mechanism.

Therefore potentially the implementation of prison wage policy highlights the actions of the corrective apparatus of the prison, thus ‘exerting an influence on the soul’ and ‘readjusting the prisoners towards the norm of “docility-utility”’ (McNeill, 2018: 21). How effective this disciplinary power proves to be in ensuring compliance will depend on whether prisoners are largely resigned to their situation thereby internalising discourses of ‘punishment’.

Indeed, our data complicates the idea that prison wages contribute to the creation of ‘docile workers’ within prison. Instead, our data suggests a quite critical engagement with prison wages amongst our participants. The relative lack of analysis of the meaning and critical engagement with wages in prison for people in custody has been largely overlooked until now, something our study seeks to redress.

With respect to the ‘free’ granting of labour power, during interviews, numerous mentions were made of the expectation that participants were located in a ‘working jail’, highlighting a moral compulsion (albeit backed up by more coercive means) to work, and thus bringing into question the rehabilitative lens through which prison work is often presented (Alós et al., 2015).

More recently Fassin (2017), somewhere between Sykes's descriptive approach and Foucault's more theoretical analysis of prison wages, provides some detail of the nature of prison wages in a French short-stay prison. Fassin explicitly links employment to wages, providing insights into the wider social context around prison wages. Fassin brings in a number of themes we develop in our analysis relating to minimum wage legislation and links between consumption and wages in prison. Furthermore, the level of prison wages described by Fassin (‘of between 200 and 300 euros [per month] if the inmates had not been off sick’ (2017: 202)) is starkly contrasted to our data. Such a contrast has obvious implications for economic connections to families, as, unlike in the Fassin study, it was inconceivable that the participants in our study would be able to send any money to their families. The exact opposite emerges in our data, in so far as our participants often put additional demands on family resources, who were often expected to send money to their relative in prison. The implications of these demands on the families of those in prison have been explored elsewhere (Jardine, 2017, 2019).

Looking more widely, prison wages do appear fleetingly in some of the main prison handbooks (Bosworth, 2005; Jewkes et al., 2016), although this does not incorporate the analysis of people in custody's views about prison wages, or what meaning wages have within the context of everyday life within prison. Whilst contributing to the frustrations and pains of imprisonment discourse, the addition of Foucault's artifice allows our analysis to move beyond the mere identification or categorisation of new pains (Haggerty and Bucerius, 2020).

Prison wage policies

In this part of the paper, we move from more theoretical considerations to situate Scottish prison wages within a wider international policy context where prisoner wages have been a concern for a number of years. For example, in 1991 in reference to prisons in England and Wales, the Woolf report argued that then levels of prisoner pay constitute:

‘a very substantial cause of disquiet and dissatisfaction within prisons’ and said that prisoners ‘should be able to earn more realistic pay levels’. (Home_Office, 1991: 162–163)

The quote above goes some way to problematising the ‘docile worker’ that Foucault indicates is a product of the prison system. Following this influential report, prisoner wages have been subject to some debate in relation to the level of financial autonomy and responsibility that prisoners gain from payment for their work. As is suggested by Zgoba et al. (2020), the context of the prison environment alters the way that we can think about wages and payment as remuneration for work. Simmonds et al. (2016) in the United Kingdom, and Sawyer (2017) through the Prison Policy Initiative, have commented on the discrepancies in prisoners’ wages, and the policies which underlie them. In discussing the question of whether prisoners should receive wages, Sawyer (2017) highlighted the disparities in wage levels across prisons in the US. Some prisoners in Nevada, at the highest end of the scale, earn over $28 dollars a week in correctional institutions, and prisoners at the lower end of the scale in South Dakota earn barely over $1 a week on average. In contrast, states like Arkansas, with a more explicit punishment ethos, are states where prisoners do not receive remuneration at all. As indicated above, the context of prison life, and the conditions under which the wages are earned cannot be analysed in the same ways that we consider wages beyond the prison walls. Inadequate wages for prisoners can lead to examples, as given by Sawyer (2017), of prisoners needing to save wages for two weeks to purchase a $10 phone card, or to purchase a box of tampons (this example is from a US state where the rate of pay reaches an average of $0.63 an hour). As Sawyer suggests, ‘the value of a dollar changes when you earn pennies an hour’ and the relative costs of things in prisons means that there is rarely any wages that are saved. With the author highlighting that the rates of pay, as they were in 2017 actually seem to have decreased on average over the last 20 years, the hidden and disproportionate reliance that prisoners have on wages with respect to their purchasing power in custody emerges as a growing problem.

Zgoba et al. (2020) explore the context of prison purchasing and wages in greater depth. The authors consider the costs of items in the prison commissary (shop) relative to the costs of items outside of prison within supermarkets in the US. They found that the rates placed on basic items such as allergy medicines or magazines were affordable – albeit after saving for a longer space of time to purchase these items than would be necessary on the outside. However, items, such as aspirin for headaches or dentures adhesives are outside of the range of affordability for prisoners unless they save for longer periods of time. Furthermore, by reducing the availability of ‘luxury’ items which prisoners could see as a treat or form of recreation, like a chocolate bar for example, the prison system is minimising the autonomy through limiting financial independence (analysis that resonates closely with Sykes pains of imprisonment relating to the deprivation of autonomy). The authors make the case that the relative expense of the commissary, coupled with the inability of the prisoners who rely upon it to earn substantial enough wages to properly make use of it, serves as a further punishment and indignation within the prison system, a privilege only accessible by a select few.

In the US the lack of substantial remuneration for work, coupled with the hidden costs of purchasing goods and services in prisons, means that the gate money, the cash given at the point of liberation is the only reliable source of funding that prisoners have at the point of re-entry. For example, this is currently $200 in California, a rate that hasn’t changed since 1973 (The Guardian, 2022). Quigley (2003) considers the lack of financial independence, and the inability for the prison population to support themselves as a further punishment and indignation. Additionally, the author considers the inadequate rates of pay, and the lack of opportunity for prisoners to participate in work and be trained in skills, as an external and additional punishment extended also to the families of those who have been incarcerated. Quigley argues that most of the families of prisoners are already impoverished and, therefore, by removing the opportunity of prisoners to earn wages, the prison service limits the financial security of the family. This is either through preventing any meaningful source of income from the imprisoned family member, or due to the family needing to send money to the family member in prison so they can receive services or goods.

Prison wages in a European and Scottish context

Within Scotland the current Prisoner Wage Earning Policy (developed in 2012), indicates that prisoners wages range between £5 a week to £18-£21 for more demanding or undesirable work. There are bonus schemes for certain types of work (SPS, 2012). Until now there has been no analysis of the implications of this policy. It is within this context that our study is situated, a context within which there is relatively little pre-existing research of the meanings attached to prison wages by people in custody, and no research undertaken in the distinct and devolved Scottish penal context.

Within this policy context, it is useful to consider some other European approaches to wages policy and how this is connected to wider government policy. In a number of countries, there is some connection to the national minimum wage or other labour standards.

In England and Wales, Simmonds et al. (2016) suggest that the rate of payment in prisons is not satisfactory to ensure that every prisoner has enough money to cover every cost. For older prisoners, and those who are unable to work for health reasons, costs for televisions rent and the costs of ‘reasonable’ basic items from commissary can often be unreachable – requiring additional money to be sent in from outside from family or friends to meet these costs. Prison work is paid on basic rate bands, leaving little room for performance, effort, education, and qualification to impact on the amount of pay that prisoners receive. Wages, therefore, do little to incentivise effort within the prison workforce, nor education which will encourage prisoners to be ‘better’ members of that workforce (something also briefly considered by Crewe, 2009). When this is coupled with the papers’ findings that additional, and often unnecessary, costs are attached to various purchases and service – like ordering clothes from catalogues, and additional tariffs on phone calls – prisoners may feel as though they are working to earn too little in an environment that asks too much and does not see their wage go far enough. As one interviewee in Simmond et al.'s (ibid) paper mentioned, ‘the canteen goes up, but pay doesn’t’.

While many of the findings in this paper resonate with the approach to prison wages by His Majesties Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) in England and Wales (where wages range from £7.00 to £23.75 per week) (MoJ, 2018), there are a number of examples of different approaches to prison wages in European jurisdictions. In Italy, for example, ‘prisoners must be given a salary not inferior to two thirds of that stated for the same job by the national contract’ (Marietti, 2013: 24). Similarly, in France, people in custody receive 20%, 25% or 33% of the minimum wage for service roles, depending on the exact nature of the role itself (Crétenot and Liaras, 2013). Not all European countries (including Finland, Sweden, and Norway) have national minimum wages, but have a system of sector-by-sector tariff wages, shaped by collective bargaining within these sectors. It is evident that trade unions not only generate increased job security (Bender & Sloane, 1999), higher wages (Blanchflower and Bryson, 2010; Freeman and Medoff, 1984), but also improvements in staff wellbeing (Bryson et al., 2013). There are very few examples of trade unions for prisoners and no organising of this type was discussed in our study,² despite important efforts in this regard within the US in the 1960s and 1970s (for example, ‘Support Jackson Prisoners’ Self-Determination Union’). The low levels of prisoner wages would no doubt be a major focus of any prisoner trade unions if they happened to emerge, although these forms of ‘hard’ citizenship tend to be restricted as a function of imprisonment itself (Behan, 2019).

Given the lower reoffending rates resulting from the Nordic imprisonment model (Ugelvik, 2016; Ugelvik and Dullum, 2012), Scottish prison policymakers and politicians often look to the Nordic countries for inspiration, despite the lack of any explicit link to wages outside prison. Indeed, these can diverge quite substantially. In Norway, for example, Halden Prison provides greater emphasis on education and job training with a wide range of different job types available. Prisoners there receive 60 Norwegian Krone (around £5) per day's work (Berger, 2016).ⁱ Although the exact rates vary, in Finland there is a payment of around £5 per hour for work carried out inside prison, with higher rates outside prison also available (Jones and Ekunwe, 2011). Prison wages within some Nordic countries might then be an area of relatively less progressive prison policy and practice, within systems more widely that are often considered to be relatively ‘progressive’ (Smith and Ugelvik, 2017) and ‘exceptional’ (Pratt, 2008). Whilst wages are seen to be an important part of how prisoners engage with work in prison, this suggests that prison wages cannot be considered in isolation from the wider policy landscape as regards post prison reoffending rates. Therefore, prison wages can instead be viewed as one important contributor in making prisoners feel that their work and, by extension, the prisoners themselves, are sufficiently valued and respected.

Methods

This study was undertaken in the devolved Scottish penal context (Croall et al., 2016; McNeill, 2016; Morrison, 2016), with study findings resonating within prison systems where prisoner wages are lower than are found in community settings. Our project took a two-phased approach. Firstly, a desk-based analysis of the rules and regulations was undertaken in order to understand the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) policy on prisoner wages. As part of this first phase a literature review was also completed, focusing on prison wage policy and academic literature that has been included in this paper. The contextual phase helped to shape the second phase of this project, which involved interviews with 29 people in custody, to understand perceptions and the meanings associated with wages in prison. Within this study, findings relating to wages were analysed in relation to comments about wage rates, the wages policy in Scotland and family issues that emerged in relation to wages (the implications of prison wages for the families of our participants are reported elsewhere).

Twenty-nine one to one semi-structured interviews of an average 34 minutes, were undertaken in private rooms with a range of people in custody at three Scottish prisons. These prisons were chosen to facilitate interviews with a diverse range of people in custody. Interviews were undertaken with all the principal prisoner groups, long and short term adult male, young offenders and women in custody. Interviews ranged from 15 to 60 minutes in length, and were undertaken with the interview schedule developed from an understanding of existing SPS policy and the relevant literature as outlined above. Interviews were transcribed professionally and subsequently analysed in Nvivo 12 using an inductive analysis (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006). Key themes are linked back to existing theory and literature outlined above, allowing the unique data collected to be considered within the wider context of the sociological analysis of everyday life in prison.

The sample

The 29 participants were selected locally within each of the prisons within which fieldwork was undertaken. Purposive sampling was used within this study, with participants selected by prison staff locally, who were asked to provide people in custody serving a range of sentences across different demographics. In discussions with prison staff, the research team asked staff to identify a diversity of people in custody involved in different types of work with associated contrasting wage levels. The 29 interviews include fifteen interviews with men, six interviews with women and eight interviews with young people in custody (five young men and three young women).

Ethics

Following ethical approval from the SPS Research Access and Ethics Committee and Glasgow Caledonian University ethics committees, 29 interviews were conducted in three Scottish prisons. All research participants read the project information sheet in full and gave their informed consent to take part in the project, as indicated by the signing the appropriate consent form. Consent was completed before recording was started. Research participants were permitted to withdraw from the research project at any time without explanation, although no participants chose to do this. All relevant data was securely retained in line with relevant ESRC guidance and all participant quotes are included in this paper anonymously, with all identifiable information removed. There are particular ethical challenges relating to qualitative studies such as this being conducted in prison settings where prison staff select the participants for the study (Kristensen and Ravn, 2015). One of the main ethical challenges in our study related to the recruitment of participants by prison staff and the limited scope for the research team to influence recruitment. Consequently, it is unclear the extent to which participants may have felt pressured to take part in our study before they took part, or critically the voices that might have been excluded (Abbott et al., 2018).

Findings

Project findings relating to prison wages are clustered around two main areas, comments on wage rates and comments on how these rates are determined that bring into question what prison work is for. The paper concludes by situating our analysis within in a wider context of the everyday life within prison, which until now has lacked the explicit analysis of prison wages from the perspective of people in custody.

Reflections on prison wages

Resonating with debates and divergent approaches to prison wages internationally outlined above, a significant part of our study was focused on discussing wage rates, both current rates within the SPS and levels of wages desired by study participants. The majority of comments about wages in prison tended to be negative, shaped by prison wages in Scotland in one week amounting to roughly the same as what those in the community would earn in an hour, based on current minimum wage levels.ⁱⁱ Despite this general negative outlook on wages, it is important to recognise that two participants in our study stated that they felt the wages were adequate for their needs in prison:

Yes, …it's £11. I think it's just to pass my time… I don’t think about the money. Yes, I would do it anyway, I would do more [work], I don’t mind, because like even £11, I don’t finish my £11. It's different because we are in the jail, so I don’t know about other people, but for me, it's enough.

The quote above captures the impact of enforced boredom if people are not taking part in prison labour, resonating with the analysis of boredom more widely within the criminal justice system (Ferrell, 2004). Prisoners who refuse to work can potentially lose television access if they go ‘on report’, thus further intensifying the boredom of not taking part in ‘purposeful activities’. Boredom within prison settings, is important to understand as an ‘inseparable component of crime and crime control’ (Steinmetz et al., 2017: 342), and an important factor in ensuring a lower wage rate. As the participant above indicates in reference to prison work they would ‘do it anyway’. Even if this is not so marked in other interviews, it is an important consideration for the level of wage rates accepted by prisoners.

It is also possible this perspective stems from the participant having always been on state benefits of some kind. Therefore, despite this only being £11 in this instance, this was to an extent seen as an extension of the financial support that such participants received from the state prior to prison, an there was an expectation that this support would continue following release. Some participants who were receiving state support prior to entering prison, were essentially living in poverty and were thus more likely to find low prison wages less ‘painful’. For example, the participant below indicates that he didn’t need anything, and there was a sense that the pay she received was sufficient:

I’m better off in the jail. I don’t need to worry about heating, I don’t need to worry about feeding myself. I don’t need to worry about anything. Doesn’t matter what jail I go to, I’ll get a decent job. I’ll be well paid, know what I mean. I said, I’ve got everything. I’ve got three meals a day. My heating, my washing done for us. I says, I don’t really want anything.

Two recent articles have addressed the issue of people being ‘better off’ in jail (Bucerius et al., 2021; Schneider, 2023). Removed from the systems of constraint and employment legislation outside of prison, there is effectively an extra judicial or self regulating environment where national minimum wage legislation are not deemed relevant. With respect to the national minimum wage, the discussion around what effectively constitutes ‘food and board’ resembles other aspects of the economy where NMW legislation does not apply, including, for example, the British Armed Forces. In addition, this highlights the mental and financial challenges for many prisoners outside of prison as well as indicating a degree of institutionalisation that was reflected on later in the interview. There is a clear sense in this quote that the work he was doing and the wages he received were considered adequate, which could be influenced by the actions of the ‘corrective state’ outside the prison, with regards to benefit claimants and increased monitoring.

It is important to recognise that these sorts of views were relatively peripheral within our sample. Conversely, for most participants, prison wages were experienced very differently and caused greater levels of frustration and pain. The participant below highlights the stark contrast between his pre-prison wages and wages within prison:

I was on eight hundred pound a week there; now I’m only a tenner a week. Know what I mean? I’ve been in 13 months now. So, you calculate that and it's a lot of money lost.

For this participant, this was felt like a significant loss of income that was a direct consequence and pain associated with being in prison. Consequently, our data indicates that participants’ pre-prison wages and employment status had an important impact on the frustrations and pains associated with prison wages. The overwhelming majority of the comments about wage rates in prison, amounted to a recurring perception that the wages were too low:

But it's only like a tenner a week. Twelve max. So, it's not good money in here. All I’ll get is 20 a weekⁱⁱⁱ plus my wages. So, I can spend about 29. They deduct something off you.^iv So…but from 28 to 29 quid a week; I can spend it.

There was further nuance to these discussions, with some participants indicating that the £5 cell wage that everyone received whether they worked or not, was not considered as part of the wages they received. Working was motivated not simply by the wages that their work generated but perhaps more formatively as working provided something to do, reduced feelings of boredom and providing an opportunity to get out of their cells. It is also important to consider the sentiment that a number of participants shared that the perceived level of wages were lower than this for many participants, given that everyone got £5 whether they worked or not. The consequences of the low level of prison wages had further negative consequences for our participants, that went further than impacting on their views on and engagement with work in prison. There was a recurring sentiment across the majority of interviews that prison wages were not enough to live ‘comfortably’ on in prison. The low level of wages often resulted in difficult choices between staying connected to family and friends or buying things from the canteen list³ to make life more comfortable:

The wages I don’t think its enough to live for a week. Basically you’re thinking of what you can have and what you can’t have kind of thing. It's definitely not enough to live with.

According to the Scottish prison rules (Scottish Government, 2011), the SPS will ‘ensure that every prisoner is provided with wholesome and nutritious food and drink on a daily basis and will ensure that the quantity of food and drink provided to each prisoner is adequate for health and nutrition and is well prepared and well presented’. The canteen list⁴ enables prisoners to buy additional items such as crisps, chocolate, branded toiletries as well as a range of other items… It is important to state that prisoners do not receive cash for their work, but credit in their prison account to be spent on items from the prison canteen, to make phone calls and to buy items from certain catalogues. For the standard telephone system, a prisoner can top up their phone account from their wages through their canteen sheet. Under exceptional circumstances this can be done through their PPC. During the COVID-19 pandemic all prisoners in Scotland were given a mobile phone to stay in touch with their family and friends. Every month these mobiles are automatically updated with 300 min of use at no charge to the prisoner, there after they can use their wages to top this up.

A number of participants reflected on the increase in the cost of goods as a consequence of inflation since the last review of wages in Scotland that took place in 2012. That wages had not increased along with the cost of items on the canteen list meant that participants had to try and find ways of making their wages stretch further, although, at times, this wasn’t possible. One woman reflects on these challenges below:

What I was saying is, see, razors, they’re £7 a week, you know, and I put £2 in my phone every week, to phone my mum, that's my full £9 gone, you know, just so I can have a shave, you know what I mean. And that's without roll-ons, a couple of quid, do you know what I mean. It's not as if we’re all buying sweeties and vapes. If I wanted a vape, I couldn’t get a vape, you know what I mean, if I wanted to.

Similar challenges were reflected on by most participants who discussed the challenge of budgeting with such low wages. As a result difficult choices had to be made in terms of being in touch with family or vaping in the example above. The balance between having some small comforts within prison and calling family was almost impossible to achieve on what were consistently perceived as very low wages:

It's a balance. I want to speak to my people outside, so I’ll commit that to my phone, and bugger the rest. Or, they do without speaking to people on the phone and they end up with mental health issues, because they can’t speak to people, they become depressed, they become anxious.

There emerges a consistent theme of dissatisfaction with current wage rates in our data. The quote below summarises the general sentiment expressed across our sample that the perception of low wages was undermining the work that the participants were doing in custody.

I just think the wages are sometimes too small. For working all week and for them being the same as what they were 13 years ago, I just don’t think it's right.

Furthermore, it was evident in many of the interviews that inflation was an issue for participants, as wages had not gone up while goods on the canteen list had increased in cost. Several participants suggested linking wages to inflation in order that the purchasing power of wages stayed consistent. In a number of interviews the perception that the wages were low meant they felt less valued, and thus an increase in prison wages could improve self-worth within custody. A number of participants suggested that increases in PPC allowances up from the current £20 limit would be problematic and increase inequalities in prison and place additional pressures on prisoners’ families and friends. Importantly, our findings suggest that the participants in this study can experience the frustrations and pains associated with prison wages quite differently. These differences were shaped by a number of factors including the level of their wages or benefits prior to prison, and the extent to which they family and friends were able to support them through weekly PPC payments that to an extent mitigated the low levels of prison wages for some participants. We must also recognise that consumption within prison is not restricted to wages and PPC payments with prisoners also getting into debt within prison. As Crewe states in a study in a medium-security English prison, debt can be a particular issue for certain prisoners:

Prison wages are low, and there are limits on the amount of private cash that prisoners can spend each week. As a result, prisoners with heroin habits have to borrow or steal forms of currency in order to finance their consumption. And where as cannabis and tobacco debts can add up to a few pounds, heavy users of heroin can accumulate much larger and more problematic debts within very short spaces of time. (2005: 466)

It is also evident in this section that both initial wage rates and inflation were together limiting the consumption that prison wages enabled, clearly resulting in ‘restricted consumption of goods and services’ – one of the five key pains highlighted earlier. Having analysed the ways in which our participants discussed what they viewed as low levels of wages, and the implications of this, the section below analyses the confusion over the current prisoner wages policy in Scottish prisons.

Rationale for prison wage rates and confusion over policy

Our data suggests significant confusion and disquiet over the underlying rationale for the level of prison wages. Such confusion resonates with Foucault's suggestion that wages in prison represent an artifice, paid not as an exchange for the ‘free’ granting of labour power, but issued as a technique of correction. Whilst the gap between wages and work more generally has been critiqued by Marx through the concept of ‘exploitation’, the appearance of a ‘free and fair exchange’ potentially seems more contested in a prison setting. We contend that the situation we explore in prison settings, could be seen as an extreme version of the wider myths associated with wages, including that labour rates and labour costs are equated (Pfeffer, 1998). The situation in prison settings emerges as quite different from community settings, where work and wages have a greater appearance of connectivity, through, for example, minimum wage legislation (Edgell and Granter, 2019). Arguably prison labour and its wage rates act as a particularly extreme example of the lowest end of the modern service economy, thus socialising people for entry into the lowest paid rungs of the labour market (at best).

Despite some participants enjoying aspects of the work they did in custody, a number of participants indicated that they felt the low wages they received devalued the work that they did, thus resonating with Sykes’ (1958) argument about the effect on the prisoners’ ‘sense of personal worth’:

I’ve worked so many manhours and I’ve earned nothing really for it. If that same man would do work outside, you’d be…you know what I mean, you’d be probably rich.

The quote above illustrates the negative consequences of low wages for this participant working for ‘nothing’, and the ways in which low levels of pay devalued or brought into question the point of the work he was doing in prison. The quote above resonates with Foucault's (1977) analysis of wages being an artifice, that we argue is a central aspect of the frustrations and pains associated with prison wages. For Foucault prison labour forms a constituent part of the wider techniques of correction within prison settings (1977: 243). The negative views of prison wages that many of our participants expressed, had further implications for their engagement in work within prison, with some participants considering working a waste of time given the limited returns. Despite the official discourse around ‘purposeful activity’ within the SPS (SPS, 2014), for many participants the low level of wages devalued the work that they did, and to an extent undermined their work ethic:

They’re not getting nothing or they’re getting eight quid or something a week or nine quid a week, like what are you meant to do with that? I don’t think it's worth it. I think it's kind of…it's an insult actually, some of the wages that some boys get.

The description of the wages as an ‘insult’ here indicates that rather than simply inducing docility, the level of prison wages can be a source of significant discontent. Indeed, whilst the underlying logic speaks to the disciplinary function, it is entirely possible this is imperfectly achieved, if at all.

Additionally, the confusion over the policy and the perception of inconsistency in its application was another source of discontent amongst prisoners. Currently, there is one wage policy applicable in all SPS run prisons across Scotland (SPS, 2012),⁵ that should result in relatively standardised wage rates. Despite this, there was a recurring perception that there were different wages for the same job in different prisons. that brought into question the point of working, and questioned the fairness of the link between prison wages and the specific role being carried out. The importance of a sense of ‘fairness’ in the application of prison policy in relation to consent and distress has been well established in a range of studies. For example, Liebling has analysed the implications of the inconsistent application of incentives and earned privileges (IEP) policy in prisons in England and Wales:

…prisoners who feel treated unfairly quickly become defiant and resentful and withdraw their consent. This is not the only response, however, and some become highly distressed. Feeling frustrated and badly treated can make prison life hard to survive. (Liebling, 2008)

The significance of the variability in the application of the wages policy (whether real or assumed) discussed by our participants in our study, is that such variability and inconsistency provides insights into the ways in which prison wages function as an artifice of the wider conditions of confinement. If prison wages and prison wage policy were more consistently applied, the myth of the association between work and wages would perhaps remain obscured. It was evident across several interviews that a number of the participants in our study found variation within and between prisons in relation to wages particular to the prison experience, where people have limited control over the work they are able to do and the pay they get in return for it. The variability we explore here functioned to contribute to wider questions of the problems of legitimacy within prisons thus relating to perceived variations in ‘distributive and procedural fairness of treatment’ (Sparks and Bottoms, 1995: 45).

Several participants believed that there was different pay in different prisons:

In different prisons you get different pay. Like, I know in HMP A you get different jobs and they get like up to twenty-five pound a week. And then even like in different prisons but it's still SPS, in HMP Kilmarnock it's a private jail but it's still SPS and they get similar, like twenty-two pound a week.

The contrast highlighted in the quote above might in part relate to different wage policies in private and public prisons in Scotland. A relatively small number of participants stated that they felt that wages in private prisons were higher than wages in SPS run prisons. This was discussed in some detail by the participant below:

Aye. Well, I think it's too low. Eh? See in private jails you get about 15, 20 quid a week. And that goes quite a long way. And you can get up to 30 quid a week in the kitchens up there. Eh? But in here it's only 12 pounds. Aye. So, HMP Kilmarnock you can make 30 quid a week just with wages, if you’re in the kitchen, like.

The idea that wages for doing the same job were different in different prisons made some participants ask fundamental questions about wages and their meaning in prison, bringing into question the perceived legitimacy and fairness in the application of prison wage policy. The inconsistencies suggested here point to wages being an aspect of prison life that caused some confusion and potential dissatisfaction for the participants in our study. The quote below indicates that one prisoner wanted to be moved back to HMP A due to wages being much lower in the prison he was currently located:

As I say, this one guy wants to move back to HMP A where he was because the wages are completely obviously a big drop, and it's obviously no good for him.

The quote above highlights the significance of wages being seen to be lower in certain prisons than in others, in so far as this could be a motivation to try and move prisons. There were a small number of accounts of people wanting to move in response to low wages in particular prisons. This points to the significance of wages in the lives of people in custody:

Yeah, because I know one person who's been all over the prisons in Scotland – he's been here about six months and he's even thinking of moving to a different prison just for the simple reason of the wages. He said how can you live like this?

Here we also see the implications of low wages and low associated spending power within prison. The assumption that wage levels were standard across the prison estate was challenged by a number of participants:

They say its national. I said, it's not national. I said, I’ve been in them all, I says, in the last ten years. And I says, I know, I says, what the wages are…in all these jails, you know what I’m talking about, I says, this is one of the worst pay in the country. It's a different…if you’re in one part of the country you get a paid a different wage from this part of the country and this seems to be the worst prison for paying.

The findings of this study in relation to prison wages were during the pre-COVID-19 era (data was collected for this study in 2019), and it is evident that the pandemic has further complicated this aspect of life within prison. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on everyday life in Scottish prison (Armstrong et al., 2022; Maycock, 2021; Maycock and Dickson, 2021; Morrison and Graham, 2022). This has resulted in proportionally significant increases in wage rates as illustrated in the response from the SPS below to the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic within the Scottish prison system:

Everyone in prisons is being provided an additional £2.50 per week of phone credit. Individuals will not be financially disadvantaged as a result of not being able to work. Those receiving the lowest wage are being provided with an additional £2 per week and the £1 television rental charge is being suspended and is also being added to their personal cash. (EuroPris, 2020)

If wages can be increased in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this raises the question of why they were not higher pre-pandemic. These changes resonate very closely with Foucault's analysis that wages in prison are an ‘artifice’, in as much as prison authorities can increase (or decrease) wages in an instant if circumstances dictate. However, it is unclear whether such changes in the ways that wages operate will continue after the COVID-19 lockdown and whether pre-pandemic wage levels will be returned to, which would be a fruitful area for future analysis.

Conclusion

Until now, prison wages have been a relatively overlooked part of everyday life in prison. In this paper we have provided a background outlining different approaches to prison wages across Europe and the United States. We have analysed the ways in which wages were experienced by prisoners themselves and the negative consequences that arose from current prison policy including constricted consumption, difficult economic choices and harmful associated consequences for family members.

In this way, this paper contributes to the perhaps implicit arguments for reform attached to the wider frustrations and ‘pains’ literature (Haggerty and Bucerius, 2020) by locating wages as an example of the ‘restricted consumption of goods and services’. However, in addition to this iterative or additive contribution (or ‘proliferation of pains’), Foucault's ‘artifice’ was used to analyse narratives about prisoner wages, thus attesting to the intent behind existing policy and with a more explicit link to structural power relationships. For Foucault, wages at one level constitute an artifice within prison, ‘presumed to be effective in the techniques of correction’ by means of a moral reformation (1977: 243). However, our analysis perhaps brings into question this idea of socialised compliance or ‘correction’ as implied by the ‘docile worker’ thesis. Many participants in this study engaged critically with the level of the wages they received, although this engagement was significantly influenced by their employment history and level of wage prior to going to prison. Part of the appearance of docility that Foucault analysed within prisons, may emerge from a relative lack of visible organising amongst people in custody in order to resist and reform aspects of life in prison such as extremely low wages. Despite this, it is important to recognise that there are a number of exceptions to this (Behan, 2017; Fitzgerald, 1977; Irwin, 1980). This includes the establishment of prisoner trade unions in Denmark, France, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, UK, and the US. For example, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) established in 2014, in 2016 were part of a coalition who organised the largest prison strike in US history. Perhaps the disciplinary mechanisms within prison do not completely determine the extent to which people in custody are and will continue to be ‘docile workers’?

At a time of increasing industrial action with the UK and internationally, in response to a significant cost of living crisis within a context of often well under inflation pay offers, our analysis is particularly timely. In June and July 2022, the Prison Officer Association Scotland (the main trade union for prison officers in Scotland) balloted their members regarding a 3.5% consolidated pay offer, with prison officer pay expected to rise by around 5%. Despite these negotiations, no discussions have been taking place relating to prisoners’ pay which have remained unchanged despite the challenges our participants discussed in our study. Such a lack of attention is influenced by two main factors Firstly, there is a lack of organising within prisons in relation to prisoner trade unions who, if they existed, we would expect prison wages to be a major focus of their activities. Secondly, polls and surveys consistently illustrate that a large proportion of the UK population feel that prison is too ‘easy’ (prison as ‘easy street’ Hough and Roberts, 2005). In July 2022, a YouGov poll indicated that 47% of UK survey respondents feel prison is too easy, while only 9% felt it was too hard (YouGov, 2022). Consequently, questions relating to aspects of everyday life in prison, such as the very low level of wages we analyse in this paper are often not considered in ways that are focused on making daily life in prison more comfortable. Given that greater supporting information on, for example, social security levels (about what they actually are) can influence such opinion polling, perhaps supporting information on prisoners’ wages could play a similar function.

Our study has a number of limitations, in part relating to the small sample of only 29 participants in only three of the fifteen Scottish prisons. This has a number of negative consequences. For example, this has resulted in no participants located in private prisons being included in our study. Additionally, given the sampling approach outlined in the methods section, it is evident that prison staff had a significant influence on who took part in our study. We cannot be sure what this influence has meant for the extent to which our sample represents the full diversity of work and pay levels within the three prisons in which we undertook data collection or the other twelve Scottish prisons. A further limitation relates to timing of data collection being pre-pandemic. It is evident that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant change in life in prison and prison policy, including in relation to prison work and wages, although it is currently unclear the extent to which such changes will be sustained in the longterm.

Our findings in the Scottish penal context suggest that wage rates, and confusion over the rationale behind them may have a profound impact on how prisoners relate to their employment. Our analysis also illustrates that the frustrations and pains associated with prison wages were experienced differently by those within our sample, with pre-prison levels of wage being an important influence. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that wages in prison can be quite arbitrary and can even be changed suddenly by other events influencing prison systems (such as pandemics).

We hope that through our analysis a greater awareness will emerge around prison wage policies and rates, in particular in relation to the stark contrast between weekly wages in Scottish prisons being in many cases very similar to the hourly minimum wage outside of prison. Furthermore, the UK Government produces a list of 16 groups of people within the economy who are not entitled to the NMW in the UK,⁶ of which prisoners are one group. We hope that our analysis of prisoners’ views of the wages they earn in prison will lead to further studies and comparative analysis between these diverse groups that also includes members of the armed forces. Ultimately, through the analysis of perceptions and experiences of prison wages our paper provides unique insights into an until now largely overlooked part of everyday life in prison.

Footnotes

i

In 2018, skilled workers earn a minimum of NOK 197.90 (£16.95) per hour, while unskilled workers with no experience should earn at least NOK 177.80 (£15.22) per hour. Source: accessed 11th March 2022.

ii

The current minimum wage within the UK is £8.91 per hour for those over 23 years of age. While the hourly living wage is £9.50 an hour for everyone working in Scotland.

iii

The £20 referred to here relates to Prisoners Personal Cash (PPC), that can be sent to someone in prison by their family or friends. This is capped at £20 per week.

iv

There is a £1 deduction each week from weekly wages to pay for TV licence.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Matthew Maycock

Notes

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