Co-developing Service Futures in Confinement - designing with inmates

Approximately 50 percent of people under the care and management of Ara Poutama Aotearoa (the Department of Corrections) identify as Māori, compared with 15 percent of the general population.  In 2017 the Waitangi Tribunal found the Crown in breach of its Treaty obligations by failing to prioritise the reduction of the high rate of Māori reoffending relative to non-Māori. In December 2018, Cabinet agreed to adopt ‘major improvement’ in services as the strategic path for the prison network and in 2020 Ara Poutama Aotearoa adopted a new organisational strategy: Hōkai Rangi rooted in Māori values and to be applied to all people in care, with a greater commitment to rehabilitation and reintegration programmes, and the rollout of kaupapa Māori spaces and services at every prison. 

EY was tasked with developing a business case for the kinds of changes envisaged, using human centred design to define new service concepts driven by…