Coming out of the midpoint review we were tasked with committing to one of the three directions we had presented to the class. This was not a decision we wanted to rush. Each direction had come from genuine research and real insight, so we felt it deserved a proper conversation rather than just a quick group vote. We set aside time to work through each direction honestly as a group, weighing up not just how interesting each idea was but how realistic it was to actually design for given the scope of the project and the time we had available.
What became clear quite quickly was that one of the three directions could be eliminated early. The remaining two were much harder to separate, and it took a more structured approach to land on a final choice.
The first direction we looked at was the gap in communication between the organisations involved in the prison and release process. This had been one of the most consistent themes across all of our research. Barry had spoken about it at length during the mentor interview, describing a system in which there are two of everything, two sets of systems, two sets of ethos, two ministers, and nothing joined up. On top of that, community organisations are actively competing with larger bodies for funding, which means collaboration is structurally disincentivised. It was clear that this fragmentation was responsible for a significant portion of the failures within the prison system as a whole.
That breadth was ultimately why we decided to step away from it. The very thing that made it such a rich problem area also made it the most difficult to design for meaningfully. If fragmented communication between organisations is responsible for the majority of systemic failures, then solving it properly would require change at a policy level, across multiple government departments, over a very long timeframe. A design intervention from a student team cannot realistically move that needle. We were not dismissing the importance of the problem, we were being honest about the limits of what we could achieve within it. The risk of pursuing something this expansive was that we would end up producing something too vague to be useful, a solution so broad it did not actually solve anything specific. We agreed early on that this was not the direction to take and turned our attention to the remaining two.
This was where the real deliberation began. Both the agency direction and the debt prevention direction had come directly out of the mentor interview and both had clear roots in our research. Choosing between them was not straightforward and required us to think carefully about what we were actually trying to achieve with this project.
The agency direction had emerged from what was personally the most surprising moment of the entire interview. Barry had completely reframed something we thought we understood. Early in the project we had taken it as given that routine and structure within prison were broadly positive forces. They keep people occupied, build habits, and provide stability in an otherwise chaotic environment. Barry challenged this directly. His argument was that the dependence prisoners develop on the prison routine actively works against them. Over time, having every decision made for them, every hour of every day structured and controlled, strips people of their sense of agency entirely. When they are eventually released, that dependence does not disappear. It simply transfers. Some return to old peers and environments. Some become reliant on the state. Some turn to substances. The prison has inadvertently conditioned them to need something to depend on, and release throws them into a world where they are suddenly expected to function as fully autonomous adults again with no transition and no support.
This felt like a profound insight and one that had not come up anywhere in our desk research. It was the kind of finding that only a mentor interview could have surfaced, which made it feel particularly valuable. The idea we had begun to sketch around it was a self owned release planning tool, something a prisoner could engage with voluntarily during their free time, choosing to plan their own release at their own pace. Lining up housing options, exploring employment, mapping out what their first weeks of freedom might look like day by day. The act of planning itself being the intervention, building the habit of making decisions and taking ownership before they ever walked out the door.
The debt prevention direction had a very different character. It was quieter and less conceptually exciting but it had something the agency direction did not, which was a clearly defined problem with a clearly measurable solution. The issue is simple. When someone is incarcerated, their financial obligations on the outside do not stop. Direct debits keep firing, phone contracts keep billing, broadband keeps running. The person inside has no practical means to cancel these services, and nobody else is doing it for them. By the time they are released, months or years of accumulated charges have often tipped into collections, with added fees and interest on top. They walk out the door into a financial hole they did not dig intentionally and had no tools to prevent.
This direction had come to my attention through my own work experience at BT/EE, where I had regularly dealt with ex prisoners calling in about exactly this kind of debt. It was not theoretical for me. I had seen it play out in real conversations with real people. Barry had also confirmed during the interview that this was a genuine and largely unaddressed problem, which gave it additional credibility. The solution we were beginning to imagine was an automated alert system that would notify service providers at the point of incarceration, triggering a pause or cancellation of financial obligations before the debt had any chance to build.
To make the decision between these two directions as clear as possible we decided to map out the pros and cons of each on paper together as a group. Rather than continuing to discuss it verbally we wanted to see the arguments laid out side by side so we could assess them without letting enthusiasm for one idea cloud the thinking on the other. Paul took the agency direction and I took the debt prevention direction, and we each made the strongest case we could for our own before stepping back and looking at the full picture together.