Summit Media

Summit is an E-Commerce company that operates in The Wolds prison, having previously been run in HMP Rye Hill - where I was one of their first employees about a decade ago.

Summit sharply divides opinion.  As a private company, they make millions in profit, based on the work done by prisoners who are paid around £15 a week.  You can see the moral objection...?

Yet I not only volunteered for the opportunity, I had to pass an interview and selection process.  It was a position I had to fight for.  At that time, I didn't know squat about the Internet.

The work environment was interesting, in that Summit provides a specialist service and the expectations upon our professionalism were correspondingly high.  Being treated like a capable human being is a novelty in prison.

However...Summit wished to pretend that it wasn't operating within prison, whilst relying on that very fact for its existence. If we were absent from work for exercise, visits, medical appointments - the detritus of daily prison life - then they used to bitch about it.

The largest objection to Summit is the argument it offers for paying such low pay while raking in such gargantuan profits.  Summit argues that the training it provides would be hideously expensive for us to gain in the outside world, and that the skills Summit endows would lead to good prospects upon release.

Well, yes - and no.  Summit prefers to employ Lifers and long-termers.  Assuming a normal course through the sentence, a man may leave Summit and not reach the outside world for 4 or more years.  The relevance of the skills in such a fast moving field after that length of time away from the Internet is questionable.

Summit also declines to say just what percentage of its employees leave prison and find work in the field.  That raises loud alarm bells for me.

And as a matter of equity, any company who can make millions in profits should at least pay minimum wage to its workers.  Cut through the sophistry, and it comes down to fairness and decency.  Summit stinks.

An interesting footnote, though.  The prison service refuses to allow us Internet access on "security grounds".  How then, does Summit manage to operate within prisons? Perhaps the income it generates may help answer that question? Or are we just uncovering yet another piece of stinking hypocrisy on the part of our keepers?