Improving Communication, Prisoner Welfare and Support through Mobile Collaborative Technologies

Prison officials often experience challenges with coordinating prisoner welfare and support because it demands not only time but several responsibilities. From the user study conducted, we discovered that there is the need for efficient communication amongst the record officers, welfare officers and higher prison authorities that require information for both short/long term decision making. The large network of prison authorities makes it difficult to stay informed and organized. Consequently, errors in sentence computation and award of remission as well as the breakdown communication may result to reduced quality of support to prisoners. Therefore, we explored the possibilities of aiding the coordination of prisoner welfare and support through mobile collaborative technologies i.e. an online platform accessible from any smart device. In the light of identified design opportunities, we suggest SentCompute - a prison sentence/bail computation platform consisting of interactive tools for supporting activities of prison officials and prisoner's loved ones.