European Organisation of Prison and Correctional Services (EuroPris) in cooperation with the International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA) will organise in the first week of April 2019, the third Global Corrections Digital Technology Conference, ‘Technology in Corrections: Digital Transformation’, which will be hosted by the Portuguese Prison and Probation Service.
WANT TO PRESENT YOUR WORK?
During this conference, we would like to focus on challenges within three major themes. Therefore we are asking you to present prison and probation services with new insights or ideas, innovative solutions or interesting pilot projects, addressing the following key areas:
1) Finding an equilibrium
Both prison and probation services are challenged to increase efficiency (do better or different with less), focus much more on rehabilitation whilst keeping society safe. To find a good balance between efficiency, security, and rehabilitation we need to take a look at new recipes. For the first topic, we would like to challenge public sector, researchers and private sector companies to showcase new ideas and innovative approaches where technology plays a central role to address all 3 aspects in a balanced way: efficiency, security, and rehabilitation.
Presenters are asked to share new ideas, recently implemented projects or pilots where technology plays an important role and where preferably 3 but at least 2 of the following criteria are met :
The (expected) outcome has a primary or secondary impact on improving security;
The (expected) outcome has a positive impact in preparing offenders for release, helping them to return to society and reduce reoffending;
The (expected) outcome increases efficiency: supporting a more effective use of means, reduce costs, improve deployment and usage of staff or enables more effective service delivery.
2) Evidence-based
EuroPris and ICPA as professional organizations promote the implementation of evidence-based approaches for corrections. The speed in which technology is changing is often overwhelming our world. This makes it difficult to analyze and evaluate technology-driven projects and measure if initial objectives are met or secondary effects are appearing. For the second topic, we would challenge public sector, researchers and private sector companies to share with the audience technology solutions and/or project approaches that have included:
Extended pre- and post-evaluation procedures that enables measuring outcomes on both short as the longer term;
Methodologies (e.g. agile development, change management, big data and data analytics) with the different involved actors (management, staff, end-users) that support continued improvement & evaluation of the solution;
Mechanisms (e.g. open data) and collaboration with researchers and research institutions;
New technologies such as Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence to help getting better insight and making decisions;
New approaches to help us to become a better learning organisation.
3) Looking over the wall
Digital transformation is not something that is only relevant for prisons and probation services. To be called innovative a new approach or solution needs to be transformative but doesn’t necessarily have to be completely new. Many innovations are mainly the use of ideas or products in a new context. As we are convinced that both prison and probation services can learn a lot from other sectors, we would like to challenge public sector, researchers and private sector companies to share with the audience innovative technology solutions and/or project approaches that successfully bring ideas and products from other sectors into our domain.
We would like to encourage people from different backgrounds (Public, Private, Academic or NGO) to respond to our challenge and present your solutions at this unique event.
Abstracts will be selected based on their quality and should fit the following criteria:
Presentations must fit at least one of the challenges;
Presentations are accepted from any sector (multi-sector presenters preferred);
The abstracts must include at least three questions for discussions;
Any references to research or outcomes must have the sources stated;
We allow a maximum two speakers per presentation;
Presentations will be non-commercial/non-product with a focus on case-studies or examples of how a problem has been solved.
To encourage the participation of conference participants, presentations should ideally have an interactive element to engage the attendees. You can express your interest by submitting an abstract on www.corrections-technology.com. When submitting the abstract, please specify the theme and topic you want to address, the solution you want to present and the format of your presentation no later than January 4th, 2019.
Promoting professional
