Penal labour in the United Kingdom

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Penal labour in the United Kingdom exists as part of a framework of rehabilitation.

Across all jurisdictions of the United Kingdom, imprisonment with "hard labour" ended through legislation passed in the late 1940s and 1950s, but in general penal labour remains.

Prisons have historically used Incentive and Enhanced Privilege systems, known as IEPs, to encourage prisoners to behave well, and participate in mandatory labour and education, by assigning each prisoner a designation of "standard", "basic" or "enhanced". Since 2019, the UK Ministry of Justice has updated this to a policy of Incentives Policy Framework, with the main difference being that governors are explicitly encouraged to set wages to be differentiated between different statuses - where in the past this practice was explicitly criticised by different inspectorates, because it creates inequalities between different wages for prisoners doing the same work - and are explicitly encouraged to create statuses even higher than "enhanced".^[1]