diginomica: Going straight to digital skills - providing laptops to offer prisoners tech skills

Coracle is taking no prisoners in its attempts to bridge the digital divide in the prison population.

One consequence of our increasingly digital society is that fundamental tasks, like applying for a job or getting a bank account, can only be done online. For some groups in society, they risk being left behind, unable to access basic services due to either lack of access to a device or lack of digital skills.

One of these groups is the current prison population, which numbers almost 90,000 people in the UK and two million in the US. By the time someone has served a five or 10-year sentence, technology will have moved on to such an extent that any digital skills people had before entering prison are likely to be outdated by the time they leave.

<p.There’s also an economic factor to consider. According to the UK's Ministry of Justice (MoJ), re-offending costs the UK £18 billion every year. Investment in education programs for prisoners with an emphasis on helping them into employment is fundamental to achieving a reduction in reoffending rates.

Read the feature on Diginomica here.