Alice only waited a couple of minutes for the other officers to arrive. “I was just so panicked. I was just babbling on the radio,” she recalls. “I thought they were going to die”.
Behind the bars of the cell, an inmate of her medium-security male prison was bleeding heavily. Protocol forbids a prison officer on evening patrol from opening a cell before two more officers have joined them. She could only stare through the door while his cellmate demanded that she do something. Even if she could have entered, Alice had only undergone basic first aid training in her six-week course before she joined the prison.
In the end, the inmate’s cut was far less serious than the volume of blood on the cell floor had suggested, and he lived. Alice has since learnt that many inmates know which artery primarily produces drama rather than damage.
Alice is one of 140 recent graduates of top universities working as prison officers through the Unlocked graduate scheme. It was the brainchild of someone who had come through the Teach First programme and follows a similar model: tempt panicking final-year students into the public sector with the promise of two years of secure employment, decent pay (£35,000 starting salary), and a debt-free master’s degree. Since the programme was set up in 2017, it has placed 900 people in 38 jails in England and Wales. But after the Ministry of Justice failed to renew the programme’s £4m a year contract, Unlocked Graduates has said it is likely to close.
For Alice, Unlocked was just one among 20 graduate schemes she applied to: “I got an email from the career service [about Unlocked] and to be honest I was applying for so many jobs.”
Like many Unlocked grads, Alice is an unconventional prison officer. She describes her university self as “a very non-confrontational person” and a “bit of a walkover”. There was considerable confusion from friends and family when she told them she had been accepted onto the scheme.
Her father didn’t leap to endorse his daughter’s decision. He was both worried about her safety and slightly disappointed that, armed with a good degree from a top university, Alice was choosing a career path that never required a degree in the first place. “He has come around to it now,” she reassures me.
This unconventionality did not go unnoticed on her first day. The offenders were generally “quite friendly”, but the staff less so. A degree of suspicion surrounds Unlocked grads—regarding both their robustness and their corruptibility.
“The majority of corruption cases are young women in guys’ estates getting into inappropriate relationships with prisoners,” Alice tells me. Unlocked grads, who are 70 per cent female and almost all under 25, are therefore considered prime candidates.
The suspicion between the old and new guard is more than personal; it’s professional too. In the six weeks of training given to recruits before they start in their assigned prison, grads are taught that compassion and communication are essential to building effective relationships with offenders. This approach can stand in contrast with some of the more hardened members of HM Prison and Probation Service.
Alice jokes: “Every time I say something nice about a prisoner… they are all like: ‘Oh, well, here comes the Unlocked grad.’”
However, Alice is keen to dispute common media portrayals of abusive officers. Body cameras are always worn and officers are required to write “essays” about any incident of physical contact between them and an offender. This is one of the few areas, Alice says, that her degree somewhat equipped her for. But she does say many longer-serving officers treat prisoners with greater hostility, although she can understand why. Many officers, Alice says, have been “punched”, “spat on”, “pissed on” and had “hot water chucked at them”.
She also notes that while Unlocked grads have weekly sessions to discuss traumatic aspects of the job with peers, regular prison officers are not given the same opportunity. “Most have never had a single conversation about the trauma they’ve experienced,” Alice estimates, “and now they’re behaving poorly towards prisoners.”
In late July, it was announced that the Unlocked Graduates scheme would be discontinued, after the organisation and the Ministry of Justice were unable to reach a new procurement agreement. At a time when the prison service is struggling with recruitment and retention, the MoJ’s decision to withdraw funding seemed baffling.
But for Alice, the whole scheme never quite made sense. “The intelligence you need to work in a prison is definitely not the intelligence you need to get a degree,” she says, adding the whole model has an air of “saviourism” about it. She did, however, find the scheme personally revolutionary.
She tells me of a day at work earlier that week, in which she confronted a prisoner about his spice addiction. “I’d never really spoke to him that much… and he just burst out crying” she says. It transpired that the offender had just lost his wife and had entered a deep depression.
“We had a proper conversation and set him up with mental health [support] that afternoon,” Alice recollects.
Her two years on the front line have been filled with moments she won’t forget. “I’ve got a lot more used to blood,” she reflects. “But I’m not so sure if that’s a good thing.”
