Booking a prison visit should be simple and straightforward. Until now that was far from the case. Booking a visit required both prisoner and visitor to jump through hoops: paper forms and drawn-out phone calls. And if the visit date turned out to be impossible, they had to start all over again.
Now you can book a visit online. It takes about 5 minutes. Before, picking an available date was pot luck. Now there’s a date-picker that lets you select 3 possible slots instead of 1. It’s a straight-forward service with user-needs at its heart but, if you get stuck, you can call the prison’s visits booking line and someone will help you with the booking.
Here’s a very short film we’ve made about it:
By making it easier to book visits, prisoners will see more of their friends and family. Evidence suggests this will help their rehabilitation. Transformation isn’t just about websites.
The service was built by the Ministry of Justice, with a combined team from the National Offender Management Service, HM Prison Service and MoJ Digital Services.
For more of the story behind this service, read Mike Bracken’s account of his trip to HMP Rochester or check out the service’s transformation page.
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