Why working in prisons helped me co-found Apolitical

12 April 2024 | The 13th edition of The Apolitical View by Apolitical CEO and Co-Founder Robyn Scott. Subcribe to the newsletter

In this week's edition:

• Data’s key role in prison reform
• Sneak preview of our learning survey early data
• 20,000 elephants in Berlin

Before Apolitical, I spent years working in maximum and medium security prisons in South Africa. Brothers for All, my social enterprise, focussed on training offenders and ex-offenders to code. Two of my co-founders were ex-armed robbers who believed serving time could be an opportunity for personal reform and education — and knew that both are impossible without dignity and opportunity in the prison system.

By the time someone gets to prison, turning things around is extremely hard. Failed policies are various and vividly apparent in the criminal justice system. Too often, one or more of these failures is the reason someone gets sent to prison. Seeing the domino effect of bad policies was one of the reasons I co-founded Apolitical — to support government officials to make and implement better, more successful policies, working upstream of the problem. I’m currently writing a book about the prisoners I worked with in South Africa, so the recent drumbeat of media stories about the need for prison reform is especially poignant. Encouragingly, these calls come from all sides of the political spectrum, and there are several examples of governments experimenting with new approaches in 2024.

Tempted to stop reading? It’s true prisons aren’t a glamorous part of policymaking. But they say a lot about a government. As Nelson Mandela famously noted: “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

Globally, incarceration is failing to achieve intended outcomes. In South Africa, recidivism estimates range from 80% to over 90%. Rates are not much better in many high-income countries. In England and Wales, adults released from prison sentences of less than 12 months had a proven reoffending rate of 54.9%. The rate within two years is 52% for Taiwan, 45% for France and 55% for Australia. This means prisons are failing to set offenders up for life after incarceration and governments are not making policy decisions that support them.

One policy intervention which promises better outcomes is reprioritising skills and training in the prison system. Research in the United States found that education can reduce re-offending rates by 43%. With nearly 2 million people behind bars in the US at any given moment in time, the impact of such a change could be extraordinary. A recent study at Ghana’s Nsawam Medium Security Prison confirmed the benefits of a digital skills training programme — and concluded that prisoners have aspirations for life after prison which include starting their own business and a strong appetite for learning. And not all training has to be digital — in the UK, prisoners are receiving barista training and learning skills which could help them start their own roastery.

Effective learning relies on a humane physical environment – and climate change is playing a role. Education can help reduce the size of the global prison population in the long term, but prison overcrowding makes any sort of learning difficult, if not impossible. A few governments are exploring alternative policy solutions to this global phenomenon — Kenya is testing a community service sentence for petty criminals, and Malaysia is thinking about letting offenders with short sentences serve their detention at home. Extreme heat caused by climate change could add yet another layer of stress to prisoner’s physical conditions. This personal essay on the heat in a Texas prison brings to life why summer temperatures are becoming a human rights issue.

Data-informed decision-making is crucial to effective prison reform — including easing overcrowding. As just one example, a former Utah congressman decried the lack of data in his state’s prison system: “It was shocking how precious little data we had. It was distressing to realise how little we know about what we were doing and why we were doing it.” It was only after a concerted effort to investigate who was actually in their prisons that they discovered over 65% were there for parole or probation violations rather than new criminal convictions. Better data can help inform the policy decisions that could break so many prisoners out of an endless cycle of incarceration. Building a data-confident culture in governments is a priority, which starts with building data capability at team level.

Speaking of the merits of data, I wanted to share some early insights from the global Public Servants' Learning and Skills Trends Survey we’re currently running. When concluded, the data will provide governments with a comprehensive global snapshot of public sector learning and development.

• There’s a small but impressive cohort (around 15%) of super learners who spend more than 10 hours a month on their professional development. We'll be speaking to these learning champions about how they prioritise continuous learning, and what they can teach their teams.
• Knowing what to learn is an overlooked piece of the puzzle. Around a third of respondents say they lack clarity about the knowledge and skills they need to develop their careers.
• The basics really matter. Although AI currently dominates the conversation, most public servants appear to be more interested in learning about the fundamentals of government digital transformation.

We’ve had nearly 1,000 respondents already and it’ll be interesting to see how seniority levels, job roles and countries reshape the emerging picture. We’ll publish the data in July as an open resource for governments. In the meantime, if you’re a public servant, please do take the survey (it’s just 6 minutes) and share it with your networks.

Robyn Scott

Apolitical CEO & Co-Founder

What's in our diary this week

Thu 18 April | I’m looking forward to speaking with European Commission officials in Brussels to share our insights on governments’ uptake of AI, and what we are doing to build AI-ready governments.

Wed 24 April | Our first-ever AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) event on AI in government with distinguished former public servants like Jennifer Pahlka (US Digital Service) and Andreas Varotsis (10 Downing Street AI team). I’ll be joining public servants for this open-floor session exploring how AI is transforming government operations from the ground up.

And finally...

Diplomatic spats sometimes get out of hand, but rarely to the extent of one country threatening to expel 20,000 elephants to another. That’s the beef between Botswana and Germany right now. Botswana, where I grew up, is home to 130,000 elephants — too many, it says. Germany has none. Botswana views regulated trophy hunting as a pragmatic solution, Germany wants little to do with the practice. This is just one startling episode in a much bigger storyline about economic development and moral calculus.

Got thoughts, feedback or ideas for what you'd like to see in this newsletter? Send them directly to me or leave a comment below.