To prepare for our mentor interview we decided to come up with some potential questions based on our previous research.
To find what questions would be most informative and impactful for our interview we decided to draw on our research areas to see which had the most potential information yield. This meant looking at; Poor Continuity Of Care, Limited Community Resources, Housing Crisis, Fragmented Responsibility between justice, health, community and services and Digital Exclusion.
Quite early on we were able to eliminate Fragmented Responsibility between justice, health, community and service. This is due to the lack of research we had on the topic as the person it was assigned to did not complete their deliverables. That being said we did as a group look into the topic to make up for this short coming but we still felt the scope of the topic was so broad that it might cause issues down the line.
We then looked at Housing Crisis. This one much like the previous felt so great in scope and in the population affected that it almost didn’t relate to prisoners being released as it is an issue affecting the entire population with still little solution.
We found that Poor Continuity Of Care and Limited Community Resources were riddled with issues and had great potential as foundations for interview questions. For my own area I found the aspect of security and the limitation it imposes on prisoners access to devices interesting. Aside from that nothing screamed at me from my own area of focus.
We also felt it would be productive to ask questions outside of these areas. We agreed on the following topics to explore. We thought it would be worth asking what kind of release planning is currently in place. This could give us a great insight into the current state of the system from the perspective on someone who deals with it, hands on. With this in mind we deemed it worthwhile to get our mentors perspective on a more holistic level. This helps him to feel more included within the interview but could possible lead to some unique insights.
We also decided that if we opened and ended on questions directly about our mentors experience it would be a nice way to frame the interview on a whole. We felt this approach laid a good foundation to begin refining these areas of questioning. This leaves us with the following areas to enquire about.
Now that we had a good foundation to base our questioning on we decided it would be good to broaden our scope a little to touch on some other areas we might be neglecting.
Based on our research we noticed we had a lot of overlap with issues surrounding case ownership. This fell into many buckets so it felt like a perfect area to touch on in our questioning.
I came up with what I though was a great area to touch on, for a bit of clarity. My current job role is as a billing service guide for BT/EE. This means I encounter billing issues with the general public all of the time. One issue relating to this project I noticed is I often have ex prisoners call in who have accumulated huge amounts of debt with BT/EE. This is because their direct debits and standing orders continue and so do their services. They only seem to be ceased once the account has been in collections for quite some time. I feel this is a huge potential area for us to touch on so I would like to know just how aware are the incarnated population of their finances on the outside.
In expanding we as a group tried to generate some pertinent areas we felt have gone unnoticed thus far or just haven’t been given the time of day that they deserve. We came up with the following areas. Addiction & Substance Abuse, Mental Health & Support, Typical Progress made upon Pre-release and Demographics.