A nose for trouble

Hanging out with the tech bros, high fivin’ robots from a booth dispensing free kale chips and biodegradable pens – it’s all great fun, but figuring out exactly how these technologies will solve problems in the world of public service, and presenting the case to stakeholders, is more of a challenge.

As one of the biggest central government departments in the UK, employing 90,000 staff, the Ministry of Justice is a huge organisation with many different stakeholders: for starters, it is responsible for around 80,000 prisoners in UK jails and also 250,000 people on probation.

The department is also supported by 34 different agencies – including the Prison and Probation Service – as well as many other public bodies – including the parole board and the Law Commission.

According to MoJ’s chief digital and Information officer Gina Gill, when it comes to “exploring the possible” with any new technology, the first hurdle the Ministry’s digital arm, Justice Digital, faces is explaining to its largely non-technical workforce how innovation can transform and return value back to the business.

A few years ago, the department decided to foster a culture of innovation within its far-reaching ecosystem, kicking off with a series of demos and talks from outside organisations. They included the likes of EasyJet, The Danish prison service and the Estonian government as well as nuggets from Big Tech players themselves – such as Google, AWS and Reply – a global firm specialising in designing solutions in the digital services, tech and consulting fields.

As a follow up to these initial set of talks, Gill and her team worked with suppliers, colleagues and other stakeholders on a series of bespoke demos that could highlight possible use cases.

Smelly prison VR

According to Reply client partner manager Hannah Fisher, one challenge that came up in the user research was the fact that 40% of trainee prison officers leave after their basic training – one of the main reasons cited is the sensory overload they experience on their first day at work.

Gill adds that it’s not the prisoners’ behaviour that’s the problem, but the heavy jackets the officers must wear combined with the noise, and – most notably – the sheer smell of the place.

It’s not documented in countless films, books and TV shows about life on the inside, but, according to those who work in them, the average men’s prison in the UK smells of disinfectant mixed in with a whiff of male locker rooms and a strong hint of beef-flavoured Pot Noodle (which, it turns out, is a permitted and much-favoured in-cell snack enjoyed by Britain’s prison population).

“It varies from prison to prison – sometimes they’re allowed cans of tuna or tabasco, so they’ll often mix things in with these ingredients – but that whole mix together is something many trainee prison officers say is hard to deal with,” Fisher notes.

To immerse would-be prison officers into the full day one experience, Justice Digital and Reply designed a demo for a VR experience.

The digitisation of the prison experience was spun up within 18 hours and built on pre-existing gaming blocks, although the initial research took longer.

The dimensions of the rooms, the widths of the corridors, finding out what the lighting was like and what prisons have in terms of bedding, toilets and sinks in their cells was all vital information, but hard to get hold of – given the limited-on site access.

Noises were also added to the experience – as was the smell, which was recreated using a mixture of smell jars which were released into the atmosphere at different points.

“You can buy off-the-shelf attachments that release smells for VR – but they always smell of roses or something beautiful – not awful, and you certainly can’t buy a mix of different awful smells. So, we spent a lot of time getting the scent just right before we even commissioned it.” says Fisher.

The Day One experience

The resulting experience, which I got to test at Reply’s annual Exchange event last week at a venue in East London, has been designed to give trainee prison officers some idea of how they might feel on their first day at work.

The user wears a heavy flack jacket before donning a headset which takes them into the realm of the prison. The touch/ hand gesture element of the experience was particularly user friendly – enabling you to use keys to lock and unlock a cell and take objects in and out of boxes.

Because it was a public event, while the jars were on display at Exchange they weren’t opened. Reply may work on digitising the scent element – but for the purposes of the demo and “getting the conversation going” the jars were deemed effective.

Fisher adds that the feedback the Justice Digital team received from officers was that it was an all-too-familiar smell – and it raised eyebrows in Reply’s London Victoria offices when the scent was released – those rooms remained empty for days afterwards!

While the use of VR in training isn’t something new, spinning up a sector-specific example that might screen out inappropriate candidates and give those that are interested a 360 view of life as a prison guard as part of their training is a clear illustration of how this technology could add value.

The demo also led to further conversations among MoJ policy makers who also have restricted access to actual prison visits. “The feedback was that the policies they write would be much more effective if they were able to immerse themselves into the prison environment,” says Fisher.

VR caves are used for some of Reply’s Italian healthcare clients for rehabilitation purposes and Fisher and Gill are now looking at how this might transfer to a prison environment. Could VR, for instance also be used to teach prisoners service long spells about what life is now like on the outside?

Gill reasoned that prisoners who are more engaged in this process pre-release are more likely to cope in the ‘real world’ lowering their likelihood of reoffending.

Puppy power

To explore the future of work the MoJ also loaned a quadruped robot from Reply – not that sinister-looking dog bot from Boston Dynamics (although the robotics firm is one of Reply’s suppliers) but a smaller, cuter version from Chinese firm Unitree, nick-named ‘Dogital’.

“We worked hard to try and make it move differently so that it didn’t appear threatening like some of bigger robots,” Fisher adds.

Dogital was first set to work in a marketing capacity. To attract sign ups to the MoJ’s Justice Digital tech events they slapped a QR code on the mechanical mutt and sent it into the lobby of the department’s central HQ building.

“We used the attention of the robot dog and the VR headset as an opportunity to push the events, to get the word out there and encourage people to sign up,” noted Gill in an MoJ blog.

“I was surprised and encouraged at how many people got their phone out and scanned the QR code on the back of the robot dog, even if it was hesitant as it hopped around,” she added.

The digital pooch caught the attention of the MoJ’s Permanent Secretary as well as its Second Permanent Secretary Jo Farrar, who took a selfie and posted it on twitter.

It also started a conversation about how the bot might be used to help prison officers with their patrolling work.

Reply had talked about how the dogs were used by the German police force to search for drugs and by the German fire service to carry out surveys in charred buildings still too hot for human occupation.

“We then worked on a concept for prison dogs with cameras and different attachments that have been configured to sniff out illegal items,” Fisher adds.

“You could use Raspberry Pi, for instance, to check for mobile signals. There are also attachments that pick-up particles in the air that allow you to detect drug possession.”

For Gill, clearly a rising star within the MoJ, her campaign started with bold ideas and a blank piece of paper and ended engaging a collective audience of 3,500 people.

Many of these stakeholders left feeling that the latest innovations in tech had real-world applications and could play a part in fixing some of the bigger and smaller problems that its staff are facing.

And while the Smelly VR prison experience started out as a demo, Fisher is confident that by this time next year, it may well help the prison service in their recruitment processes.