The Ministry of Justice produced a report last week, showing that the Clink Charity had had a “statistically significant” impact on reoffending rates among prisoners. The Clink scheme helps prisoners to run restaurants. They learn to be chefs, bartenders, waiters, porters and front of house. They get City and Guilds qualifications in food and beverage services, professional cookery and food hygiene. In the four prisons running restaurants – High Down in Surrey, Brixton, Cardiff and Styal in Cheshire – there has been a significant reduction in recidivism, 7% overall (in Brixton, reoffending rates were 11% for men who had worked in the restaurant, compared to 32% overall).
Reoffending is mainly a story about society, actually – not about prisons, or even, especially, about restaurants. People talk about reoffending as if it were something innate in, or bred out of, a prisoner. But it is really hard to get a job with a criminal record.
The restaurants themselves teach punters a huge amount about prisons. I don’t think I have ever learned more about freedom, incarceration, dignity, shame, empathy and human beings – leastways in a lunch context – in a single sitting.
I first went to the Clink in High Down, a category B men’s prison, in 2010. The booking process is a short but intense questionnaire (do you know anyone who is currently a serving prisoner? Do you work for a government agency?). I’m not sure what the wrong answers are. Mine were all no, and I got a table.
Imprisonment as a concept is not complicated; it is a building, and you are not allowed out of it. The simplicity of the idea completely blinds you (well, blinded me) to its emotional density. It is possibly the sharpest edge of authority you could experience in a modern democracy. Maybe you would get it if you’d been in the army, but the sheer enormity of losing your freedom, and what that means for your sense of self, and of the future, is brought home so vividly by each detail: walking through the gates, surrendering your phone, the elaborate unlocking and re-locking of doors. The late Kathy Baker, a Samaritans volunteer who set up the lasting and very influential Listener scheme of inmate peer mentoring, once told me there would always be long-serving prisoners taking their own lives, often when the person on the outside they were staying alive for had died. What she would not rest until she had eliminated were the deaths on the first night, people killing themselves as soon as they arrived out of unconscionable dread. I never properly understood that until I walked into High Down for an asparagus mousse.
The restaurant itself was not prison-like at all: more like the dining room of a Mercure hotel, with textured surfaces in neutral colours, all very calming. The menu was like an upmarket cafe attached to a National Trust property: terrines, homemade pickles, lots of produce grown on site (there is also a horticultural programme). The presentation was beautiful to the point of daintiness; lots of that fussing they do on MasterChef, where vegetables are built into neat towers and sauces are dotted on to the plate like punctuation. It was the opposite of a gastropub, basically: nothing slopped, nothing homey.
There is fellowship in food. Everyone was extremely cheerful, and open about their plans for the future. Launching restaurants, cafes, taking it further, going full Michelin; it was understood that the lunchers would be curious. The convention is that you never ask anyone in prison what they are in for. Nobody does, however important. The chief inspector of prisons would not. It is quite equalising, to have a taboo that respects the sensitivities of the inmate rather than the visitor.
Five years later, I ate in the Clink in Brixton, another category B prison beset by the same challenges of a large remand population, constantly in flux, hard to enrol in behaviour-management or training programmes because there is no time. Reducing the recidivism rates in this jail is a big deal. The food was similar, though had caught up with the times (scallops were huge in the 00s; artichokes are massive this decade). The atmosphere was even livelier, it was a party for campaigners in the field, but the main difference for me was that this is my local prison: I pass it constantly, I know the buses that run to it and the rest of the regular life that happens alongside it, and I never even look up the road. Prisons do not have a hallowed aspect: however imposing their Victorian architecture, they become invisible, the eye just skates past them.
I would be interested in more than the effect on the inmates of this practical, thoughtful and innovative scheme: I would like to know whether it brings to diners some renewed sense that prisoners are still citizens, compatriots, that the state of imprisonment is only ever temporary and rehabilitation is a two-way street. And the food is really good.