Roading company Fulton Hogan took a gamble by employing prisoners to help build a new motorway through the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill and it is paying off in more ways than one.
The company says the 20 prisoners it took on through the prison system's release-to-work scheme have proved more reliable than many workers employed through labour hire firms, and six are still working on State Highway 20, months after leaving jail.
Fulton Hogan's new relationship with the Corrections Department has yielded spin-offs in Taranaki, where prisoners are driving up from Wanganui Prison each day to help build infrastructure for the Kupe gas project, and in Hawke's Bay, where one prisoner has been taken on so far.
It's a brave and far-sighted approach that saw Fulton Hogan highly commended in the Tomorrow's Workforce Award category of the EEO Trust Work & Life Awards. The award recognises organisations which take a creative and innovative approach to meeting the needs to the workforces of the future.
"A lot of prisoners actually have skills - there are chippies, concrete workers, drain-layers,'' says John Smith, Fulton Hogan Site Safety Manager. "They are skills that are hard to find so we took a gamble, I suppose, took a punt, and it has worked out very well."
Johnathan, 25, started working on the project in February after three years in jail and is still there seven months after he was released in April. He said that if Fulton Hogan had not taken him on, he would probably have gone back to crime.
"`Before, I was stressing out worrying, 'What am I going to do? No one's going to hire me.' I used to lose quite a bit of sleep over that,'' said Johnathan, who preferred not to give his surname.
"If I had got out and had no job, I would have gone back to the old crowd and done crime to make money, because the benefit isn't enough."
Although Johnathan worked as a glazier before going to jail, he wanted a "fresh start" after leaving jail. He has gained experience in surveying and drainlaying on the motorway, and Fulton Hogan has helped him enrol in a plumbing course at Unitec."Fulton Hogan is awesome,'' he says. "They gave me a chance."
Junior, a 45-year-old father of six, spent a year in jail for domestic violence and is on probation until 2010. He used to be a painter but is happy to be labouring on the motorway. "I'll give this a go for a while to learn a lot of skills here," he says.
One 21-year-old man started working on the motorway four months before he finished his second jail term last month. "I started doing crime at a young age. I didn't see any opportunity to work at that stage," he says.
Phil Harman of Corrections Inmate Employment, who manages the release-to-work scheme, says 55 per cent of prisoners have never held a full-time job. Release-to-work is available only to prisoners in the last year of their sentence who have done everything required to address the causes of their offending, such as attending anger management or drug and alcohol courses.
"They're going to be released, so getting them into employment is a positive factor," Phil says. "The idea is to try and give them the opportunity to change.''
Prisoners on the Mt Roskill site catch buses from Mt Eden Prison and Fulton Hogan tells the jail if they turn up late. No one has absconded. Inmates' earnings are held in trust until they leave prison, giving them a useful nest-egg to start their new lives.
"What we found is that they were here at the crack of dawn, every day, regardless," says Fulton Hogan's Deputy Safety Manager Tash Mullen. "They often beat me to work. It gave them that incentive. It gave them something to look forward to. They wanted to be here."