I have been asked to put together (from scratch) a Policy and Risk Assessment relating to Prisoners working as Volunteers in our various workshops (not within the prison). Our workshops are open to the public and includes children.

To save me 're-inventing the wheel' does anyone have anything similar which could be used as a starter. Any specific risks which anyone might know about and which I may overlook would be extremly useful.

Many Thanks

Gillian

start with the prision services own documentation etc and go on from theire

this type of thing is a very political topic at the moment as *pressure is being put on business etc to allow prisioners, return to work people and similar to be placed in the workplace!

In many cases volunteers are just that and some, especially prisioners in my experience, just want to better themselves and can be a benefit to an employer. However, again in my personal experience with working with some people who are long term unemployed and operate in the 'black' economy, the experience can be very frustrating for any employer and their staff as some unemployed lose a lot of £ by joining such schemes!

[*Pressure, in my experience, that comes with little accompanying £ to support the activities!]

It would be sensible to refer to your own company policy for the general arrangements. The risk assessment can be carried out with the prison service health and safety managers involvement as one would presume they have already carried out this function before agreeing to them working for you. Again, why not just treat them as your own employees and refer to your own risk assessments.

We are going down this route fairly soon and have set up a system of induction and monitoring, as we would with any contractor. Your system would need to reflect upon the risks posed by each individual prisoner, and with the involvement of the prison service can place any restrictions and control measures.

We will be fortunate that the prison service will be supervising the work directly with us monitoring.

It is aparent that quite alot of Local Authorities are going down this route.

The prison will carryout the prisoners personal R/A as they will be best placed and have the knowledge of the person and the offence committed. Liase with the prison they will be more than willing to work with you. The task centred assessments will normally be in place at the workshops. One thing to remember is that a lot of prisoners have low educational attainments and therefore relying on them reading R/A's, SSOW etc is not always a good idea.