Coracle, a company which provides secure laptops to prisoners in the UK, is working with the University of Hertfordshire to develop an AI assistant that will tailor courses to the learning styles of individual inmates. Coracle’s founder, James Tweed, says the project can help plug the skills shortage and get ex-offenders in steadier jobs once they leave prison.
“The prison system can be likened to the public service of last resort,” says Tweed. “Individuals fall through the system – maybe they’ve been through care, they’ve fallen out of school, they might have mental health issues and educational issues – but all services have failed at some point. So they’ve ended up in prison.”
Coracle’s educational devices are used in 91 of the 123 prisons in the UK and it currently partners with 60 content providers, including the Open University, Prisoners’ Education Trust and a range of vocational programmes.
Ex-offenders are under-represented in the workforce
Three quarters of employers (76%) report difficulty filling roles due to a lack of skilled talent, according to a survey of UK businesses by Manpower Group. But despite that high figure, ex-offenders remain under-represented in the workforce. Although there have been some improvements in ex-offender employment following their release, 70% of prison leavers are not in steady work after six months. According to the UK government, prison leavers are nine percentage points less likely to re-offend if they are in a stable job.
Tweed believes that in-prison education and skills are essential for reducing re-offending rates. He describes the prison population as voiceless and, although he accepts the need for prisons, expresses frustration with the law-and-order, tough-on-crime rhetoric so common in popular culture and the tabloids.
But this isn’t an ideological crusade – it’s pragmatism, he says. In the UK, 60% of prisoners re-offend following the first two years of their release, compared to just 20% in Norway, where there is a focus on rehabilitation. And that doesn’t account for those who are recalled to prison for breaching other conditions, such as failing to turn up on time for a meeting with a housing officer.
“People assume that recall rates are because people have been out of prison and committed more crimes, but that’s not always the case,” Tweed says. “So how do you solve this? In my mind, what you don’t do is build lots more prison places. That’s a very expensive route that doesn’t solve the problem.”
Prisoners often think education isn’t ‘for them’
One challenge is addressing a common idea among prisoners that education is not for them. A third of the UK’s 90,000 prisoners have learning difficulties or other learning challenges. It’s estimated half of the UK’s prison population may have a neurodivergent condition, compared with 10 to 20% of the general population. And under 10% of those who’ve received custodial sentences have passed five GCSEs.
Often, prisoners view education as something that was done to them, rather than something that happened with them, and those that were excluded from school are over-represented in the prison population.
This notion quite often leads to poor confidence around learning and a resistance to technology. Tweed recalls one prisoner serving a long sentence who was completely uninterested in using a Coracle laptop. But the prisoner had an interest in chess, so James showed him an application for the board game.
“That was the route in where he suddenly learned how to use a mouse and felt like he had some control,” Tweed says. “We’re talking about people who feel they have no agency.”
This anecdote is emblematic of the approach the company and the University of Hertfordshire hope to take with its AI learning assistant that adjusts courses based on what’s interesting or helpful to the user.
Could an AI learning assistant help address the skills shortage?
The project has received funding from Innovate UK and is currently recruiting a PhD student at the University of Hertfordshire to build a pilot, which they hope to complete this year. The initial application will focus on vocational training although this might broaden out to other courses in the future.
The challenge will be in training a large language model and deploying it on Coracle’s laptops, which are required to remain offline for security reasons. Although Tweed admits this is an unusual use case for AI, he is hopeful it will have positive results.
“Can you imagine how scary it would be if you’ve been in prison for the past seven or eight years and, when you leave, you’ve never seen contactless payments?” asks Tweed. “You’ve never bought a train ticket on an app. The odds are stacked against you from the start and we punish people for not having the skills we have become used to.”
“I think that’s really wasteful – there are a lot of people in prison who absolutely would and could be valuable members of society, but we need to help them get there. And that means we need to give them the skills.”
So while putting AI in the prison system initially sounds like something from dystopian fiction, Tweed hopes that this ‘AI cellmate’ might help better prepare prisoners for their release, particularly given the pace of technological change.
Coracle, a company which provides secure laptops to prisoners in the UK, is working with the University of Hertfordshire to develop an AI assistant that will tailor courses to the learning styles of individual inmates. Coracle's founder, James Tweed, says the project can help plug the skills shortage and get ex-offenders in steadier jobs once they leave prison.
“The prison system can be likened to the public service of last resort,” says Tweed. “Individuals fall through the system – maybe they’ve been through care, they’ve fallen out of school, they might have mental health issues and educational issues – but all services have failed at some point. So they’ve ended up in prison.”
Coracle's educational devices are used in 91 of the 123 prisons in the UK and it currently partners with 60 content providers, including the Open University, Prisoners’ Education Trust and a range of vocational programmes.
