Resettlement Vision 2030
Ministry of Justice
April 2023 - Present
Location • United Kingdom
The systemic design developed for this work got me to win the Service Design Network Global Awards 2023, the premier international award for service design.
About
Developing an actionable vision and long term ambition for what effective resettlement should look like for people inside and outside prison by 2030.
Resettlement in a nutshell: is the foundational support and activity provided to prepare all people in prison (including those on remand) for their release from custody. It is embedded in a person’s journey of rehabilitation, to enable them to settle effectively in the community and reduce their risk of reoffending. Resettlement starts from day 1 in custody and runs throughout a person in prison’s sentence with a core focus on pre-release, transitioning into the community and post release.
What I did
As the first service designer fully embedded in a policy team at the Ministry of Justice, I am exploring how design and policy can partner up to develop effective and impactful outcomes for the people, services, policies and the wider system.
I co-led an influential process of unpacking and synthesising qualitative and quantitative research (conducted over 2 years) to map out the Criminal Justice System and understand how it behaves and functions.
Mapping the system has allowed my team to view the system in its entirety, and really understand what the structural issues are within resettlement, rather than just the day to day patterns policy tends to focus their attention on.
I champion my team to understand how policies impact people, to grasp the complexity of the system, and how to best untangle it to understand how things can improve to enable policies to have the desired impact.
I challenge the use of language within the system (referring to people as people, not labels, eg: people in prison vs prisoners).
Additionally, I prototype and test out ideas on a small scale before we implement anything more widely.
More on my skills…
How I’ve analysed and synthesised research insights + Mapped the Criminal Justice System
I made sense of extensive data by analysing it through a systems thinking lens (understanding how individual things influence one another within a wider whole).
I organised them against the ‘Iceberg Model’ as a way of understanding the origin of a problem. So not simply react based on an event, or on what's visible on the surface, but going beneath what's apparent and unravelling the motivations that caused the problem to exist in the first place.
Based on this thorough process, the team had a holistic view of the system. We were able to identify the connections and understand what, how and most importantly why things affect different elements in the system and each other.
Mapping the system allowed the team and senior leaders to see where the core themes were across the system and how they clearly interlink with each other.
This work allowed people to understand the current state of the system, develop the ideal vision of it, and to identify opportunities for improvement within various underlying structures of the system.
