Preparing inmates for the future
HELEN Black has prisoners completing real graphic design jobs for customers – now she wants to do the same thing with coding.
And the Toowoomba social entrepreneur might have the chance to do so, after her organisation workRestart won up to $50,000 to find out how to roll out coding enterprises into the south-east Queensland prison system.
Ms Black started Barbed Design, which employs 17 inmates to complete graphic design orders behind bars, in May last year to help reduce the reoffending rates of prisoners.
“The program I run is putting real businesses behind bars so that prisoners can get real world experience,” she said.
“In Queensland about 46 per cent of prisoners will re-offend within two years.
“One of the key ways that (help) their ability to get a job is to give them a job.”
When Barbed Design was finally launched, it became a pioneering program across Australia.
“I’ve been looking at the digital side of jobs, because the older work programs don’t focus on that,” Ms Black said.
“Prisoners can’t often touch computers, so we had to break a lot of barriers in prison – we’re the first digital business in Australia behind bars.”
The prisoners also get paid a certain amount for their labour and are given certified training to take with them when they leave.
They even completed real job interviews for the program, though Ms Black said the in mates had unusual ways of showing off their design portfolio.
“Sometimes they roll up their sleeves and show their tattoos as an example of their design work,” she said.
Thanks to the $50,000 from the Westpac Social Change Fellowship, Ms Black will now travel to the United States and England this year to visit the only two prisons in the world that have coding programs behind bars.
She said prisoners deserved the chance to learn viable skills for future workforces.