Education Behind Bars: Why Cutting Prison Learning Programmes Is a False Economy

I’ll never forget the day Marcus handed me his first essay. Eighteen months earlier, he’d walked into the classroom unit at HMP Wandsworth barely able to read a newspaper. His previous education had been fragmented, interrupted by a childhood spent moving between care homes and the streets. By the time he arrived in prison, literacy felt like a language spoken by people in a different world entirely.

That day, holding four pages of his own writing—grammatically imperfect, but undeniably his—I watched something shift in him. He stood a bit taller. Spoke with different emphasis about his sentence plan. For the first time in his life, Marcus had proof he could achieve something.

Three months later, Marcus was released. He enrolled in a vocational course on the outside. Last I heard, he was working as a warehouse supervisor. That’s what prison education does when we allow it to exist.

But I’m telling you this story now because we’re about to destroy it. Right across the UK prison estate, we’re systematically dismantling the programmes that actually work. The Justice Committee has warned of a 25% national reduction in Core Education across prisons. We’re not making strategic adjustments. We’re cutting out the scaffolding that holds people’s futures together.

The Numbers: What We’re Actually Losing

Let’s start with the blunt reality. When people are released from prison without education or skills training, 50% reoffend within twelve months. Fifty percent. That means they’re back inside the system, back consuming resources, back occupying cells that cost approximately £35,000 per year to run.

By contrast, look at programmes that actually work. Fine Cell Work, which teaches prisoners craft skills and art while locked in their cells, achieves a less than 2% reoffending rate. Less than 2%. Against a national average of 40% for all released prisoners, that’s not incremental improvement. That’s transformation.

Yet we’re cutting education funding while the prison population strains under overcrowding. In 2024-25, 72% of prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded. We’re packing more people into spaces with fewer resources, fewer teachers, fewer opportunities. The maths here isn’t complicated. It’s destructive.

When the Justice Committee examined closed prisons, they found 94 out of 104 facilities rated as ‘poor’ or ‘not sufficiently good’ for education provision. Ninety-four. We’re not just underfunding education—we’re systematically failing people at the moment they’re most receptive to change.

The False Economy of Cost-Cutting

Here’s what bothers me most about this approach: it’s dressed up as pragmatism. We can’t afford it, we’re told. The budget won’t stretch. We need to make difficult choices. I understand the pressures. I’ve been around enough business environments to know that resources are finite.

But this isn’t a calculation based on total cost of ownership. This is short-term thinking masquerading as necessity.

Every person released without education or vocational skills who reoffends costs the system exponentially more than it would have cost to educate them in the first place. A prisoner in a classroom doesn’t cost twice as much as a prisoner in a cell—it costs significantly less than dealing with that same person when they’re back inside two years later, plus the cost of whatever crime brought them back, plus the victim’s experience, plus the court time, plus the administration.

Prison education budgets aren’t keeping pace with rising delivery costs either. Inflation affects teachers’ salaries, educational materials, technology infrastructure. The system is being squeezed from both sides: stagnant funding and increasing expenses. The result is programmes closing, classes shrinking, waiting lists growing. Prisoners sit idle—warehoused rather than rehabilitated.

That’s not just morally backward. It’s economically illiterate.

What I Witnessed as a Classroom Assistant

I’ve spent time on both sides of the prison gate. I’ve been a civil prisoner myself. I’ve also worked as a classroom assistant. That dual perspective matters because I’ve seen how education transforms people in ways that punishment never can.

The men and women I worked with inside weren’t abstractions. They weren’t statistics about reoffending rates or budget lines. They were people with specific gifts, specific capacities, specific reasons for the choices that brought them there. Many had experienced trauma. Many had learning disabilities that had never been identified. Many had neurodiversity—autism, ADHD, dyslexia—that the outside world had simply pathologised rather than accommodated.

When someone has spent their entire life being told they’re stupid, that they can’t learn, that they’re not capable—and then a teacher says, ‘Actually, you can do this, let me show you a different way’—something shifts. I watched it happen repeatedly. A woman who thought she was unemployable discovers she has a gift for problem-solving and completes a Level 3 qualification. A man whose ADHD made him seem ‘disruptive’ learns to channel that intensity into a trade. Someone whose trauma manifested as aggression finds that reading novels about other people’s struggles helps them make sense of their own.

This is why neurodiversity support has mattered so much. The rollout of Neurodiversity Support Managers across the prison service acknowledged something essential: the prison population isn’t disproportionately criminal because they’re bad people. They’re overrepresented because they’re neurodivergent, because they have unmet learning needs, because the mainstream systems outside prison failed to recognise or support them.

When you accommodate neurodiversity, when you teach to different learning styles, when you create environments where people can actually access education—transformation becomes possible. That’s not sentiment. That’s what I saw.

The Personal Cost of These Cuts

I need to be direct: these education cuts will affect the most vulnerable people in our population. The women and men in prison are overwhelmingly people who’ve experienced disadvantage—poverty, abuse, neglect, systemic failure. Prison should be the moment when we say: ‘This stops here. You’ll leave with different tools, different skills, different possibilities.’

Instead, we’re saying: ‘You’ll sit here, your sentence will end, and you’ll have the same qualifications and skills you came in with. Maybe less, because you’ve been out of the employment market.’

For someone with Complex PTSD, like I have, the isolation of a cell without structure, without learning, without purpose is torture. For someone with autism, sensory regulation becomes harder. For someone with dyslexia, the shame of not understanding your own sentence can compound the trauma that likely brought you there in the first place.

These aren’t edge cases or small problems. They’re describing the majority experience inside UK prisons. When we cut education, we’re directly harming people with the fewest resources to absorb that harm.

Why Inside Out Justice Exists

I founded Inside Out Justice because I believe the criminal justice system as it currently operates is broken in a way that criminality itself doesn’t justify. I mean that seriously. The act of committing a crime doesn’t inherently warrant the system’s response to it. But emerging from that system without rehabilitation, without skills, without hope—that guarantees recidivism.

Prison education is a centerpiece of what real rehabilitation looks like. It’s not soft on crime. It’s hard on poverty, hard on poor education, hard on unmet mental health needs, hard on the conditions that create criminal behaviour in the first place.

We know what works. Fine Cell Work demonstrates it. Every prisoner who completes an educational programme and doesn’t reoffend demonstrates it. Every person like Marcus, who leaves prison with tools they didn’t have when they arrived, demonstrates it.

We don’t need more evidence. We need the courage to fund what’s proven.

The Opportunity Before Us

Here’s what makes me angry—and also hopeful. The solution isn’t philosophically complicated. It requires political will and adequate funding, not innovation or experimentation. We know education works. We know the return on investment is substantial. We know the human impact is real.

A 25% cut in Core Education across the prison estate isn’t a necessary evil. It’s a choice. We’re choosing to spend more money managing recidivism rather than preventing it. We’re choosing punishment over rehabilitation. We’re choosing to make our communities less safe while telling ourselves we’re being fiscally responsible.

The alternative is straightforward. Protect education funding. Increase it in line with delivery costs. Expand programmes like Fine Cell Work that demonstrably work. Create the conditions where every prison can offer comprehensive education, not just the ones with adequate resources. Support staff who teach—they’re doing some of the most important work in the justice system.

And crucially: listen to people with lived experience. Not just those currently in prison, but people like me who’ve been inside and come out the other side. We can tell you what matters. We can tell you what changes lives.

What Happens Next

Marcus got his second chance. That doesn’t mean his crime doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt people. It means that after he’d paid his debt, we invested in his capacity to be different. And it worked.

Thousands of people in UK prisons right now have the same capacity. They have skills waiting to be discovered, gifts waiting to be developed, potential waiting to be unlocked. Every cut to education closes a door for someone. Every closed programme is a future crime we’ve chosen not to prevent.

I’m not asking for sentiment. I’m not asking for anyone to feel sorry for people in prison. I’m asking for clarity: investing in prison education is the most effective crime prevention we have. It’s cheaper than the alternative. It makes communities safer. It transforms lives.

We can do this. The only question is whether we have the courage.

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