With our problem statement confirmed and our direction agreed upon, the next step was to begin exploring what solutions might actually look like. Before jumping straight into generating ideas I felt it was worth doing a little more research first. Specifically I wanted to look at whether anyone had already attempted to solve this problem or something close to it, and what we could learn from those attempts. I found three particularly relevant approaches worth exploring. The Import Model, Breathing Space and Financial Triage.
Starting with the Import Model, this is something countries like Norway have already put into practice. Rather than the prison attempting to handle everything internally and falling short, services are brought in from the surrounding community. Local municipal workers including financial advisors and bank representatives have a legal duty to provide the same service inside the prison as they would on the outside. On the day of incarceration a prisoner is met by a civilian advisor whose sole job is to pause their life on the outside. This covers things like managing rent, pausing utility contracts and notifying creditors immediately. What makes this approach particularly interesting is the mindset behind it. It treats the prisoner as a citizen who is temporarily away rather than a case to be processed and forgotten about.
Moving on to Breathing Space, some jurisdictions are beginning to move toward what is known as a statutory debt moratorium, essentially a legal protection from creditors. In England and Wales the Breathing Space scheme already gives people 60 days of protection from creditor action. The idea of an incarceration specific version of this would mean that the moment someone is sentenced a legal freeze kicks in automatically. No interest, no fees and no enforcement action for a set period such as the first 90 days. This is particularly valuable because it stops what you might call the snowball effect, where a small missed payment quickly becomes a much larger debt due to bailiff fees and compounding interest while the person is locked up and unable to respond.
Finally on the topic of Financial Triage, some Australian states and US federal prisons have begun implementing Financial Responsibility Programs or triage sessions within the first 72 hours of incarceration. The approach is straightforward. The prisoner works through a checklist of their financial obligations covering things like phone bills, car insurance, gym memberships, rent and store cards. From there, pre written legally backed notices of incarceration are sent out to the relevant companies, either by the prison's admin team or through an automated system. The prisoner simply signs them. What makes this worth paying attention to is the research behind it. Studies have shown that debt is a criminogenic factor, meaning it actively drives people back toward crime. Addressing it early reduces the panic and financial desperation that so often defines the period immediately after release.
With this research in hand I wanted to begin loosening up my thinking before committing to any particular direction. A mind map felt like the right tool for this stage as it allowed me to get everything out of my head and onto paper without worrying about structure or hierarchy. The goal was not to produce a polished output but to see what connections emerged naturally when I stopped filtering my thinking.
What the mind map surfaced quite quickly was that the problem had two distinct sides to it. There was the human side, the prisoner, their obligations, their awareness, their ability to act, and there was the systemic side, the organisations, the communication between them, the infrastructure that would need to exist for any solution to work at scale. Seeing both sides laid out together helped me understand that a meaningful solution would need to address both rather than just picking one.
Following on from the mind map I wanted to bring a bit more rigour to the thinking before we moved into group ideation. I ran a SWOT analysis across the three research areas I had identified, the Import Model, Breathing Space and Financial Triage, to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of each as a foundation for our solution.
What the SWOT analysis made clear was that each of the three approaches had real merit but also real limitations. The Import Model was compelling in its philosophy but would require significant buy in from government and local services to implement, making it a longer term ambition rather than something actionable in the short term. Breathing Space was powerful precisely because it already existed as a legal framework in England and Wales, meaning the groundwork had already been laid, but extending it specifically to incarceration would still require legislative change. Financial Triage was the most immediately actionable of the three, practical, low cost, and already evidenced in other jurisdictions, but it relied on human processes within the prison which introduced the risk of inconsistency and staff burden.
Taken together the SWOT analysis pointed toward a solution that combined the philosophy of the Import Model with the immediacy of Financial Triage, automated where possible to remove the dependency on individual staff members, and protected where necessary by something resembling the Breathing Space framework. That felt like a useful starting point to take into our group ideation session.
With the individual research done we wanted to get a little more experimental with our group ideation so we decided to run a method none of us were familiar with that seemed like it could be fun. We settled on Krazy 8s. From what we could gather it is a sprint method designed to help with rapid ideation. The idea is that you set a short time limit, four minutes in our case, and within that time you must quick fire come up with eight possible solutions to your problem. The constraint is the point. It forces you to stop overthinking and just generate. We ran this as a group and it turned out to be both enjoyable and surprisingly insightful. The time pressure meant nobody had the chance to talk themselves out of an idea before it was on the page, which led to some directions we might never have reached through a more considered discussion.
Once everyone had their eight ideas we grouped the similar ones together to get a clearer picture of what we were collectively working with. We ended up with the following categories. Basic communication including letters and phone calls, dashboards and apps, peer led approaches, API based solutions, feature based tools, post release interventions and bank based solutions.