Building on our first digital prisoner-facing service
The digital Launchpad Product Delivery team went live with the new prisoner-facing Launchpad Home and Launchpad Auth on in-cell prisoner laptops on 4 June 2024.
Launchpad Home is the new home page and Launchpad Auth is the new single sign-on.
After 2 weeks of the roll-out into Private Beta in HMP Erlestoke, an early survey found 74% of prisoners had used Home and Auth (77% of those more than once) while 69% of prisoners always or sometimes click on Home when they sign into their laptops. This is positive as it's a different user journey to the one they're used to.
If you don't know about Launchpad, it is the first Justice Digital built prisoner-facing service (PFS) in the UK. As an innovative HMPPS in-cell tech programme, it's LIVE in 17 prisons meaning over 13,000 people in prison have secure laptops in their cells to support their rehabilitation.
Many teams work within this programme, but the Launchpad Product Delivery team works to create a modern and intuitive digital platform empowering prisoners on the inside, to live better lives on the outside.
At the moment, those services are Content Hub (information and rehabilitation content), Self-service (requests and apps) and Virtual Campus 2 (education tool). Within the Content Hub is a section called 'Profile' which contains a prisoner's personal information regarding their visits, adjudications, incentives, timetable and money.
We've now built on that.
Benefits of Launchpad Home
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 homepage, but the back end is very different. Launchpad Home allows for much more complexity, diversity and breadth.
To do that, we needed to build software to allow a more mature home page (Home) and single sign-on (Auth) to allow for complex future builds and software access. In effect, we needed to futureproof the in-cell tech platform in order to build more and more progressively on it.
We're exploring opportunities to enable prisoners to self-serve more thus preparing them for resettlement into the community, for example ways to:
- manage the apps process in order to give them more autonomy around visits, healthcare, banking
- provide more personal data about their sentencing plans, release dates, adjudication status and daily/weekly appointments
- give them basic desktop tools to write, plan and store information with
None of this could have been done using the existing Content Hub. Launchpad Home and Auth (single sign-on) 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.
Many, (many) blockers
It's been a difficult journey going LIVE to produce a simple platform that is multi-layered. We passed through security and IT health checks at each stage, conforming to the British Standards Institute. Also, we effectively design and build 'blind' - we cannot test in situ or see our 'builds'.
So, well done to the team for the diligence, patience and commitment to seeing this through.
What's next for the team?
Shortly, Launchpad Home and Auth will be rolled out to all Launchpad prisoners.
With these live, we can finish moving the prisoner Profile out of the Content Hub to Launchpad Home, and hopefully add even more useful, available data to create a better personalised, informative user experience.
We're also exploring allowlisting external 'sister' sites, putting laptops into more prisons, and how Launchpad can move prisoner requests away from the current paper-based processes.
What can you do?
Ask yourselves if the work you're doing could help prisoners self-serve and access services from the inside. Maybe we can collaborate. Could a prisoner-facing service work alongside your staff-facing one? Please email jane.stead@digital.justice.gov.uk and come chat to the team.
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