Selected Work
Prison Leavers Project
Resettlement Vision
Video Calling in Prisons Democracy Watch
Ready Now
Photography
About Isabelle
Phase 1: Research
Engagement with over 500+ people across the system, including colleagues from the Ministry of Justice, 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.
Phase 2: Analysis
We analysed the research findings 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. We 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.