Isabelle Ohlson

Selected Work

Prison Leavers Project
Resettlement Vision
Video Calling in Prisons Democracy Watch
Ready Now
Photography

About Isabelle
Email

Rolling out Video Calling technology in Prisons  
In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, prisons across England and Wales were required to suspend all in-person family visits. Maintaining connections between individuals in custody and their loved ones became an urgent priority. In response, our team acted swiftly to adapt to the evolving circumstances, expanding our initial pilot programme—originally launched in four prisons—into a full national rollout.

Within six months, we successfully scaled secure video calling from 4 to 110 prisons. This marked the introduction of the first digital service to be made available across all public prisons in England and Wales.

What did I do?
I led on the Female estate, working closely with operational staff to introduce, train, install and support them in implementing a new technology and service to people in prison and their families during the pandemic.

I collaborated with user research to evaluate the success of the calls by conducting qualatitive interviews with prison staff, people in prison and their loved ones alongside quantitive data analysis of over 10,000 calls.

I co-designed new processes and iterations of the in-call experience based on user feedback. 

I worked closely with policy teams and operational staff, facilitating workshops to improve and iterate on policies related to video calls.