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Offender Pathway to Employment Programme (OPEP)
The ‘Offender Pathway to Employment Programme’ (OPEP) recognises the skill shortage in the rural sector and the need for offenders to train on ‘live’ projects to improve employability and reduce re-offending. It also furthers HMP Dartmoor’s own growing environmental and social aims through farm conservation work and local community involvement.
Research shows that re-offending and employment are linked and that offenders released from prison without a job are twice as likely to re-offend than those released with employment already lined up. It also shows that unemployment is the most significant barrier to successful re-integration into society by making it harder to maintain stable accommodation or to earn money legitimately .
OPEP, with a parallel programme of direct engagement with potential employers in planning for 2009, aims to help overcome this barrier through its accredited land-based training programme.
The courses are all either NPTC or Lantra accredited and are designed to give successful candidates competence in areas such as fork lift operations, dumper truck, ATV and brush-cutter operations. Every effort is put in to increase offender employability on leaving the prison. As such, each individual completes a course package that is tailored to their own employment requirements and opportunities. Retraining and gaining new technical skills and competencies is particularly important in the present job climate, with well-qualified candidates putting themselves ahead of competition who do not have the certificates to prove their competence.
The relationship between Moor Trees and Dartmoor Prison started with the establishment of a new tree nursery on the farm. This is the first step in a wider practical conservation and land-based activity programme across the prison as a whole, starting with the planting of over 1000 trees.
The prison farm staff are all NPTC/Lantra trainers and assessors for various technical certificates and provide good training opportunities to the inmates. The partnership now means they can carry on this work with the added benefit of external staff being bought in to provide additional training courses giving opportunities to many more people than before.
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