The Ministry of Justice’s education and employment strategy put work at the heart of reducing reoffending when it was launched yesterday.

This is hugely welcome. If ex-offenders are to move on to a better life it must be underpinned by stability.

Last year’s Farmer Review showed the role of families in that stability – a prisoner that keeps contact with a family member while inside is 39 per cent less likely to reoffend when outside again.

Work has a similar impact, providing the purpose and dignity, not to mention income, that can protect against falling back into old ways when somebody leaves prison.

This premise has been at the heart of the CSJ’s criminal justice work for over a decade and we were pleased to see many recommendations from our Locked Up Potential report back at the forefront of Government thinking.

Ideas such as a National Insurance holiday for businesses employing ex-offenders can work well for both parties and we are pleased to see this idea resurface.

And this is not just theoretical musing on employment. Businesses from Timpsons to Greggs are already doing work around this, while a number of our CSJ Alliance charities are leaders in the field.

Leeds based charity Tempus Novo, for example, have worked with businesses across Yorkshire to get dozens of ex-offenders into work with an 80 per cent retention rate, and a reoffending rate of just 6 per cent, compared to a national rate of more than a quarter.

Their work alone has saved the prison service millions of pounds and the economy tens of millions.

But there is a catch. It is no good giving prisoners the stability on which to build a life while the prisons in which they reside are in such a sorry state.

The most recent prison inspection report, released earlier this month from HMP Nottingham, paints a very bleak picture of life inside.

“This prison will not become fit for purpose until it is made safe,” states the report. “It was clear from our evidence that many prisoners at Nottingham did not feel safe. In our survey, 40% told us they felt unsafe on their first night, 67% that they had felt unsafe at some point during their stay in Nottingham and 35% told us they felt unsafe at the time we asked them, during the inspection itself.

“Use of force had increased considerably since 2016 with, for example, nearly 500 incidents in the six months before we inspected, yet governance and supervision of such interventions were weak.

“The prison needed to do much more to tackle the problem of drugs… Well over half of prisoners told us drugs were easily available and 15% indicated they had acquired a drug problem since entering the prison.”

It’s worth just saying that again. Nearly one in six prisoners ACQUIRE a drug problem while in prison.

Government plans on education and employment are to be welcomed, but until our offenders can be assured of a safe, drug free environment in prison, we will be pushing against the tide.

The Ministry of Justice must act fast to give our prisons the basic stability needed to become places of rehabilitation and in the coming months the CSJ will be producing our own manifesto for what that should look like.