​

In 2023, Justice Digital engaged Hippo to deliver a new service vision for prison leavers – Resettlement Passports. This commitment, outlined in the Prisons Strategy White Paper, was created to give prison leavers the support they need on release to live crime free lives. The service would enable users to keep track of important information, signpost them to support services and generally help them take personal responsibility for their transition into the community. This case study outlines the approach and work undertaken to deliver this service for the Ministry of Justice.

The client

Justice Digital is the Digital and Technology function for The Ministry of Justice (MOJ). It designs, builds and supports user-centred digital and technology services for the justice system. Its aim is to provide services that help reduce reoffending, offer swift access to justice and protect the public.

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Services (HMPPS) is an executive agency, sponsored by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).

The MOJ maintains more than 800 live services and 95,000 devices. They support prisoners and members of the public as well as 86,000 internal colleagues operating across 13 organisations and 1,000 sites. The organisation plays an important role in enabling over £1.5bn in legal aid to be paid each year, issuing over 500,000 Lasting Powers of Attorney, and supporting over 4 million in-person and remote court cases every year.

The challenge

Reoffending costs society £18 billion annually and 25% of adults are proven to reoffend within 12 months of leaving prison. For the best chance of rehabilitation and a crime-free life, individuals exiting prison require adequate housing, employment opportunities, healthcare, and financial support for successful community reintegration.

Prison staff work in a high pressure environment. They want to support the rehabilitation of prisoners but their workloads and the operational challenges of prison life can get in the way.

As the prisoner’s sentence concludes, prison staff need to review a broad range of data across numerous HMPPS systems. They have to use multiple systems to find the information to do their jobs. This limits them from doing more of what really adds value – having face to face interactions with prisoners. Manual processes around administration and communication also add to their frustrations.

These inefficiencies and difficulties compound staffing pressures, making it harder to aid prison leavers to transition smoothly back into society. Prison and probation managers currently have no baseline data and it’s hard to know how effective resettlement efforts are.

The Prisons Strategy White Paper 2021 articulated a vision for improving rehabilitation and resettlement. This was called the Resettlement Passport.

This idea was designed to provide prison leavers with practical support and, where necessary, signpost them to the support on offer from the government and wider society.

The goal was to give prison leavers access to information that helps them make a successful transition from prison and into the community.

What we did

Discovery: early strategic and creative input was key

Hippo was appointed to deliver the government’s vision of a Resettlement Passport to improve release planning, prisoner engagement and resettlement outcomes. We spent the initial part of the project interviewing prison and probation staff through a range of prison visits and remote sessions.

Our work enabled MOJ and HMPPS to rethink their expectations around delivery of the resettlement passport. For example, while the expectation from the Prisons Strategy White Paper 2021 was for a single product for prison leavers, our discovery identified the need for a pair of products:

The Prepare Someone for Release service (for staff).
The Plan Your Future service (for prison leavers).

Following our interviews we started to develop prototypes of the prison staff facing product in order to support our themes of investigation. We spent eight weeks conducting five rounds of research (resulting in five design prototypes) with a total of 38 participants in varying prison resettlement roles. With this human-centred approach at the core, creative and ideation workshops were delivered in prison with prisoners to elicit more further insights and enable a ‘co-design’ system.

Our evidence showed that without providing staff with a tool to make resettlement planning more effective and to collect the data needed to populate the prison leaver tool, the whole concept of a resettlement passport could be at risk.

Research

The team’s research efforts in both the discovery and alpha phases were exceptionally thorough, demonstrating a commitment to gaining a rich set of insights and a comprehensive understanding of the prison and probation service and the multitude of user experiences. Across Discovery and Alpha we conducted research with 100+ prison staff and 97 prisoners or people on probation (200+ users).

The team was divided into two dedicated research work streams focusing on each of the two products. We utilised multiple research methods including qualitative interviews, co-design group workshops, card sorts, surveys, contextual enquiry visits and usability testing. This methodological diversity ensured we had a well-rounded and comprehensive understanding of the subject matter, enriching the depth and breadth of our research findings, and ultimately contributing to a more informed and effective decision-making process.

Our research and business analysis resulted in the identification of the following themes of investigation:

Data and information management.
Task management and process consistency.
Performance tracking and role-based views.
Resettlement pathways and readiness.
Integration and access.

Collaborative principles and ways of working were key to the success of the research. The Hippo team worked out in the open and involved key stakeholders on the journey from the very beginning. Deep relationships with neighbouring teams were developed right at the early stages of engagement (Personal Learning Plan, Work Readiness and CIAG Induction) and they worked closely on shared approaches to design and research. Alongside this, regular workshops were delivered, and ‘teach-ins’ to stakeholders the foundational knowledge they needed to engage with the work fully (e.g. ‘what do we do in Discovery?’ and ‘what is user research?’).

Technology and Data

During the research, the team identified core areas that needed to be explored further before making technical decisions. A critical one was investigating the AWS MOJ cloud platform and if it could be leveraged for the products. Another was how to authenticate users via HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) in such a way that could help determine if they were prison staff or probation staff, and share this data between both groups that would not normally have full access to this data.

The outcome of this exploration was that the MOJ cloud platform could be utilised for the Resettlement Passport and that that the team could make use of service accounts to allow users to access both prison and probation data, as long we ensured that the user had permission to access our service before allowing them to access any data across the service accounts. For external prison leaver access we leveraged GOV.UK One Login with additional steps to digitally verify identity.

Hippo’s engineers didn’t conduct the investigations in isolation from our research and design colleagues. The team worked cohesively to ensure that when designing prototypes they were able to rely on having a strong understanding of any domain constraints and that they could ensure any tech spikes were conducted with the user’s actual needs in mind.

Following the investigations, the chosen tech stack featured:

Kubernetes via EKS on AWS.
Postgres on RDS.
Kotlin, with spring boot for the backend APIs.
Typescript and Nunjucks for the front end.

This tech stack provided multiple advantages. Firstly, it allowed the service to be part of the MOJ cloud platform which provided enhanced functionality (e.g. logging, CI/CD pipeline) for free. Secondly it allowed the team to deploy quickly with minimal downtime for users during releases, as Kubernetes would handle replacing the old version with the new version. And thirdly the distinct separation between the front and back ends meant that the team could utilise their individual strengths whilst offering the opportunity to learn new tech skills.

The Outcomes

The Prisons Strategy White Paper 2021 defines three main goals for the Resettlement Passport work:

Give prison leavers and the people supporting them better access to important information.
Make release planning more coherent, efficient and effective.
Improve prisoner engagement with the support on offer.

The Hippo team created two Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) to meet the ambition of the Resettlement Passport service vision. A staff tool ‘Prepare Someone for Release’ designed to help probation officers find the information they need, and a ‘Plan Your Future’ tool designed to support prison leavers.

Prepare Someone for Release

The ‘Prepare Someone for Release’ service is designed to make it easier for staff to get information they need to do their work. The service:

Brings relevant resettlement data together in one place, removing the need for staff to navigate multiple systems for the information they need.
Provides a new place for staff to capture data relating to post-release appointments, identification documents, and bank account applications.
Provides a place for staff to record the status of the key resettlement pathways to show when critical arrangements have been made for accommodation, financial support, employment, etc.
Uses all this data to capture resettlement progress at prison-level, helping prison leaders see hot spots and highlights more easily in their prisons.

Plan Your Future

The ‘Plan Your Future’ service is designed to make it easier for prison leavers to keep track of their appointments, licence conditions, and important documents. The service:

Brings an individual’s post-release appointments (set by HMPPS staff) together in one place, replacing the ad hoc and inconsistent communication of appointments currently in place.
Enables prison leavers to see a copy of their licence conditions in digital form, in addition to the paper copy they receive from their Probation Practitioner on release.
Enables prison leavers to print out their appointments, directions and instructions, assemble the Plan Your Future pack and and access tailored support without logging in.

The team created a bespoke alpha showcase website for the service assessment which progressed into a private beta phase with a phased introduction across multiple HMPPS services in June 2024 in different geographical areas. As of August, the services are being used across 9 prisons and 2 probation regions.

Building on the features of the current MVP, the service is now being iteratively developed to include more features for users in support of the ultimate vision to give prison leavers the support they need to live crime free lives on release.