Introduce project
The project brought together 3 service designers and 3 policy makers to analyse the current state of the prison resettlement system and develop an ambitious but deliverable roadmap for long-term change.

What was the context & industry sector?
In 2021, almost 80% of crime was committed by someone who had offended previously.¹
The Ministry of Justice has estimated that reoffending costs society approximately £18.1 billion a year.²

What was the challenge / brief?

With that in mind, in late 2022, the UK Ministry of Justice wanted to establish a clear long-term vision for how people’s resettlement needs are identified and addressed from day 1 in prison until after they’re released, to ensure they can resettle effectively back into the community, with the ultimate aim of protecting the public and reducing reoffending. The vision needed to be comprehensive, reflective of the incredibly complex nature of the underlying forces driving reoffending, but also comprehensible and deliverable.

Target market
People who are and have been in custody, and the government department and civil society actors they engage with across the justice system.

Objectives
Establish a vision and delivery model for resettlement from prison that’s ambitious and outcome focused, but achievable within current (and future) political and organisational constraints (budget, team skills and setup, etc).

As such, it would need to take into account the perspectives of people in prison and on probation, frontline staff and managers across the prison and probation system, and charities and other groups who work with people in prison and on probation. It would need to be informed by existing government policy and operational realities. In short, it would need to include an accurate representation of the as-is state of the criminal justice system, and provide a to-be vision for reducing reoffending that is desirable, feasible, and viable.

_{1 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/first-time-entrants-fte-into-the-criminal-justice-system-and-offender-histories-year-ending-december-2021
2 https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/improving-resettlement-support-for-prison-leavers-to-reduce-reoffending/}

Approach

• Research phase: Engagement with over 500+ people across the system, including colleagues from the Ministry of Justice, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), voluntary and community services, as well as people with lived experience of the criminal justice system to have a clear understanding of the main challenges across the resettlement journey from induction to post-release.
• Analysis: the research findings were analysed using a system thinking approach to understand how the system functions and how it behaves. From this, a series of systems maps were created to identify the big cross-cutting challenges and issues across resettlement (and wider), showcasing the complexity of the system and the interconnectedness of all its parts. The team chose this method because, while the team all had a deep understanding of the core factors driving reoffending, no one had ever synthesised the data in this way to separate out the most effective levers for long-term change from the more superficial approaches that were less likely to address root causes of problems.

Impact

As a result of this service-design-based strategy-setting process, the decisions the  organisation takes in coming years will be based on a holistic understanding of the whole justice system, derived from the synthesised collective intelligence of hundreds of people living and breathing the justice system every day — on both sides of the bars.

Perhaps most fundamentally, this project has brought service-design methodologies to the heart of the organisation’s long-term strategy-setting and policymaking processes for the first time ever.

This is a major government department with responsibility for decisions that impact every person in the country.

As the results of this project continue to be seen in the months and years to come, the demand for service design will continue to grow throughout the organisation. This shift in mindset and change in approach will ultimately result in much better outcomes for people in prison and on probation, a safer public, and better value for money to the taxpayers.

In this way, the greatest impact of the work will be how it enables future service design work to take place within a major government department that traditionally only applied service design thinking to Digital aspects of its work.

Service Designer/team:
Service Designers: Jeffrey Allen, Isabelle Ohlson, Diana Hidalgo + Policy officials: Harriet Mills, Kate Haseler-Young, Nisha Patel

Service Provider: UK government department and associated agencies

Client/In house project: In house

Project Location(s): England and Wales

Duration: 6 months (so far)

Year of Service Launch: 2023