The Justice Digital team in the Ministry of Justice has revealed that a digital service for prisoners has now come into use.
Named Launchpad, it can be used on in-cell laptops to give prisoners access to relevant transactional services such as choosing meals and e-learning.
It has been developed by Justice Digital to replace the existing Content Hub information and rehabilitation service and currently consists of two elements, Launchpad Home as the home page and Launchpad Auth as a single sign-on mechanism.
The roll out began in June and has now been extended to 17 prisons with over 13,000 prisoners receiving access through secure laptops. Justice Digital said it will ultimately be made available to all prisoners within the Launchpad scheme.
Foundation for future
Content designer Jane Stead said: “Launchpad Home is the place where in-cell prisoner personalisation begins. It's the foundational platform from which all future prisoner facing services and allowlisted content will be accessed.
“It looks similar to the Content Hub home page, but the back end is very different. Launchpad Home allows for much more complexity, diversity and breadth.”
She said the team is working on the possibilities of enabling prisoners to do more self-service through the application, preparing them for resettlement outside.
These include managing the apps process to give them more autonomy around visits, healthcare and banking, and providing more personal data about their sentencing, release dates, adjudication status and daily and weekly appointments.
There are also plans to move prisoners’ profiles out of Content Hub into Launchpad Home, to add more data, and possibly to allow external ‘sister’ sites onto the platform.
“None of this could have been done using the existing Content Hub,” Stead said. “Launchpad Home and Auth are a complex digital iteration of the Hub now offering the versatility, security and foundation on which to build new prisoner services and offer secure externally sourced content.”
