Families with a member in prison are often vulnerable and isolated, while visiting a prison can be torturous. Prisoners in contact with their families are better able to cope with life behind bars, and less likely to re-offend having maintained reasons to want to be in the outside world. Children with access to their mother or father stay more engaged with their education. In turn, with over 83,000 prisoners in the UK, by improving visits for families a negative chain reaction will be broken, benefiting our whole society.
VisitingPrisons is a group of people who came together and asked whether or not they could change the experience of visiting someone in prison. After two days of discussion, we believe it is possible, and built some prototype software to demonstrate the potential.
With overcrowded prisons regularly in the news and the fact that prisoners who receive visits being less likely to re-offend constantly drawn to our attention, a small change in this area could make a big difference.
Would you like to help ?
Make a change
Thu, 06/26/2008 - 08:23 — prisonvisitsThe VisitingPrisons team was pulled together, mostly at random, during Social Innovation Camp. After having been awarded second prize at the camp, the team continued to meet regularly to continue to explore the new area of society that most of us knew nothing about. This site attempts to capture some of the work that we did to explore this field.
The Prototype
Thu, 06/26/2008 - 07:54 — prisonvisits
Over the weekend of 4 - 6 April 2008, at Social Innovation Camp, the first VisitingPrisons prototype came together. Our objectives were simple; build the simplest possible system that we felt could make an impact. With only about six hours of development time available, we could not do much, but we based our prototype on the idea that we could create enough to begin a bigger conversation.
