The Ministry of Justice has revealed details of a set of six tenets to help guide digital professionals in creating tools for prisoners that are sensitive and easy to use
After more than five years of research, the Ministry of Justice has revealed a set of principles for creating services for prisoners that are characterised by “simple designs, with clear messages, delivered in a trauma-informed way”.
In 2018 the ministry launched a Content Hub, which offers various digital services for prisoners with access to a computing device in their cell. The hub – a secure intranet service which is available in some prisons and all young offender institutions across England and Wales – contains tools providing prison news and updates, radio shows, games, and support services for mental health and addition.
Since the launch of this platform, the MoJ has conducted “extensive in-prison research, [and gathered] data and direct online prisoner feedback” to help inform the creation of the newly published Prisoner-facing Services: Design Principles.
A blog post from MoJ content designer Jane Stead provides details of the six tenets:
- Design for basic literacy, numeracy and digital skills
- Anticipate complex access needs
- Build trust, show respect, design with data
- Prioritise privacy
- Practise authenticity and diversity
- Push boundaries, realistically
The first principle is intended to reflect the fact that “compared with the general population, the prison population has a higher percentage of people with poor literacy, numeracy and digital skill”. This results in a requirement to “design simply, by default, in order to create services and content that is understood by as many people in prison as possible”, Stead writes.
The second, meanwhile, speaks to the need to design for an environment where there is “a higher percentage of vulnerable people with complex needs, which means people in prison may present, and be largely undiagnosed with, one or a combination of: neurodiversity; little or no formal education; traumatic brain injury; unresolved mental health problems; substance addiction”.
The third and fourth principles both consider sensitivities around data, in a world where “prisoners can be wary of information and content associated with authority or from official source” and are also often “anxious about other prisoners getting access to their personal information”.
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The penultimate tenet aims to ensure that designers bear in mind that “prisoners, like most user groups, only engage with content they feel reflects them [and] respond more positively when listening to or watching people with lived experience”.
“For services and content to communicate well, they must be authentic, feel genuine and show diversity,” the blog adds. “We design services including people from a range of racial, cultural, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and of different genders and sexual orientations.”
The final instruction to “push boundaries” is included because “an understandably risk-averse security or stakeholder team may block new digital suggestions that could help prisoners [and] finding safe ways of pushing the digital boundaries in prisons is important”.
Stead says: “We try to push boundaries in design to make things more accessible, simple and reflective of the outside world, but we are aware and realistic of the many constraints designing for prisoners has.”
In a concluding summary of the principles, the blog reiterates the importance of clarity and simplicity, as well as heightened sensitivity to users’ circumstances and vulnerabilities.
“Prisoners need simple designs, with clear messages, delivered in a trauma-informed way which respects their privacy and reflects their lived experience,” it says.
