How can we decide the pay rates of prison officers?

According to Paul Sullivan, a former long-term prisoner, they're paid too much, Inside Time (May) reports.

Right or wrong, Sullivan's stance is evidenced by his very own set of “criteria for working out public sector wages”. Let's examine a few.

What qualifications are needed? None, Sullivan says.

Uniform policy won't suit all

HR gurus are dubious that aligning pay and conditions of those doing the same jobs for different public sector employers is a good idea

BACKGROUND

• Why you just can't be too careful these days

• Recruitment is no board game

• Patient dignity gets the elbow

• Economies of wishful thinking

Related Internet Links

• Public sector jobs

• Snakes & Ladders

Is there a real day-to-day danger to personal safety? “How many warders have been killed or maimed by prisoners in the past ten years? Compare this [with] soldiers who lose their lives at work yet earn less than the average warder.”

Do the working hours disrupt family life? Nope. “Evening lock-up times have been made earlier so that warders can get home before dark,” he says.

How do members of the public rate the job? As one of the “lowest jobs”.

Do individual lives depend on the individual's expertise, training and qualifications? Well, he says, “they lose up to 100 of the people to whom they have a ‘duty of care' through suicide each year”.

Finally, is it difficult to recruit people to the job? “There is no shortage of the under-skilled, the unemployed or ex-squaddies,” he declares.

Ouch.

Any warders beg to differ?

Officers take work on hols

Perhaps the Costa del Sol should be renamed the Copper del Sol. Police officers holidaying on the Spanish costas are being asked to help to find hardcore criminals, reports The Sharp End (May).

The crime-fighting charity Crimestoppers has released ten mugshots on its Costa's Most Wanted website - and wants officers to remain eagle-eyed through their sunglasses. Dave Cording, the director of operations at Crimestoppers, says: “Lots of police officers and staff take their summer holiday in Spain every year so we'd appreciate them keeping their eyes open.”

Crimestoppers has been working closely with the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) under the exotically named Operation Captura, because Spanish resorts have traditionally been a lucrative haven for British fugitives. So far, the scheme has brought ten criminals to justice and, Cording says, halted “some very serious criminal activity”.

Closer working between British and Spanish police and the introduction of European arrest warrants have also helped. Bill Hughes, Soca's director-general, says: “[Many] British crooks who thought they could enjoy a yachts and villas lifestyle in Spain ... are now experiencing a rather different lifestyle, at Her Majesty's pleasure.”

Power fall

First computers, then whiteboard projectors. The Times Educational Supplement (May 9) charts burglars' favourites when it comes to stealing from schools, and says that solar panels have become the latest objects of criminal intent. A primary in Gateshead fixed 24 panels to the roof having won a £20,000 government grant. They were to have been an educational talking point as well as a source of electricity, with excess power fed into the national grid during holidays. But even before the school could assess their impact, 20 had gone missing. As the TES says, solar panels are clearly hot property.

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