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The writer is founder and CEO of Coracle, an education technology company
The prisons crisis has cast a shadow over the optimism of Andy Burnham’s first few weeks in power as public outrage forced the government to put the policy of early releases under review. Much of the Sentencing Act 2026, designed to cut prison numbers, hasn’t even come into force. The prisons minister, James Timpson, resigned on the day the new prime minister took office.
There is a simple and unavoidable arithmetic for ministers. If fewer people leave prison early, more stay in for longer. Overcrowding remains a major issue. Advocates for building more prisons are offering a decade-long answer to a problem that is here and now. If we are ever to reduce our prison population we need to start asking what is actually happening inside them.
The miserable truth is that many of those who are released will soon return. The bill for taxpayers is steep, with the Ministry of Justice putting the cost of reoffending at more than £22bn a year.
I have visited most of the prisons in England and Wales. They are not nice places to be. Prisoners spend enormous amounts of time locked up with little to do. More should receive education, learn skills and become employable. Figures from the Ministry of Justice show that those who complete distance learning courses are 22 per cent less likely to reoffend. And those who find work within six weeks of release are much less likely to reoffend — 20.2 per cent compared to a very depressing 36.5 per cent for those who don’t.
Learning and skills teams in prisons are capable of inspiring meaningful change. But prison education budgets are not a priority for government and annual funding has fallen. Planned core education hours in public-sector prisons in England have been cut by 25 per cent since new contracts began last October, in a significant blot on the Starmer government’s record.
Prisoners often arrive with very few qualifications and a poor school record. The Prisoner Learning Alliance told a parliamentary inquiry in 2020 that nearly two-thirds of inmates had truanted from school and 42 per cent had been excluded. Prisoners do not eagerly sign up for educational courses.
But in an increasingly digital world, there are solutions. One of them lies with using chess as a gateway. The game is already popular among inmates. Just as a pawn can reach the far side of the board and transform into something powerful, chess can be the quiet first step that carries a person from where they are towards who they might become.
One prisoner beat the computer at chess a few times on the laptop he was given. The confidence from this took him to writing and exploring functional skills courses. He says the game lifts him and takes his mind off his mental health issues. From there can come a certificate and, for some, even a degree. Motivation is not a precondition of prison education. It is the product of it.
My company, Coracle, supplies the secure offline laptops those inmates use, so I have an interest here. The numbers, though, are not mine. An independent evaluation by Crest Advisory, conducted to Treasury Green Book standards across 96 prisons, found a return of £16 for every £1 spent on these devices, with employment being the statistically significant component.
The next challenge comes at the prison gate. We began noticing men who returned to custody asking for a laptop so they could resume the course they had abandoned on their release. Asked why they stopped, the answer was almost always the same: there was no computer at home. We now work with a charity, Rebooted, which takes corporate laptops at the end of life and passes them to prison leavers and children with a parent inside. It costs the taxpayer nothing.
Burnham has to settle how long prisoners spend inside. It is just as important to settle what those years are for.
