 |
|
| CURRENT SECTION :: Jobs | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
|
 |
The founder of one of Britain’s top IT companies has spoken out about his new vision of turning crooks into entrepreneurs. Rod Aldridge, who set up Capita in 1984, thinks business and entrepreneurship could hold the key to reforming the lives of people having left or about to leave prison. To this end, he has used his skills and wealth to set up the Aldridge Foundation, since his part in the ‘loans to Labour’ scandal forced him to quit Capita 18 months ago. Joined by Mark Johnston, one of the foundation’s success stories, Aldridge wants to invest in UK-wide projects that place ex-offenders into the workplace. “Once you’ve made a mistake, even at a very young age, it’s very difficult to get a job,” Mr Aldridge said in an interview with a Sunday newspaper. “To me that’s not right. If you have paid your price, if you have made the step to want to change, you have to be given the chance.” Figures cited by the foundation, a charitable trust, show more than three quarters of prison-leavers are reconvicted within two years of their release. But among ex-offenders on a new scheme being trialled by the National Grid, DHL and the engineer Balfour Beatty, the reconviction rate is only a reported 7 per cent. “Why are we [the government] not looking at this?,” asked Mr Johnston, an ex-drug addict with a conviction for a violent robbery. “I know people who can’t read or write but, as soon as you put money into the picture they’ve got it.” Like Mr Aldridge, he believes prisons are full of entrepreneurs, though their leadership skills and ambitions are misguided. “Take a drug dealer,” Mr Johnston told the Sunday Times, “-just look at how much business skill he has. He is managing cash flow, managing supply and demand and coming up with imaginative means to transport his stock. “Complete creativity – yet we overlook his talents, his real talents. We just need to find incentives.” Mr Johnston, an adviser to the National Probation Service, isn’t the only one in public service who believes criminals are people who have missed their entrepreneurial calling. In a speech to a business types in September last year, the Olympics minister Tessa Jowell praised street gangs for their “formidable entrepreneurial and leadership skills.” May 12, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
|
|
 
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| All content © Contractor UK Limited | [Register for News Letter] | [Privacy Statement] | [Terms of Use] | [Top of Page] |