The prisons crisis won’t improve if the government only tightens early release or promises more prison places years from now; ministers need to tackle overcrowding by changing what happens inside prisons and cutting reoffending, which the MoJ estimates costs more than £22bn a year.
James Tweed, founder of Coracle, argues that prisons should use “gateway” activities like chess to build confidence and draw people into learning; he also cites independent evidence that secure offline laptops deliver strong returns and urges policymakers to protect continuity after release so people can keep learning even when they lack a computer at home.
For prisons to work, we need to look at what is happening inside them
