New grant funding to develop wayfinding app
In partnership with Centacare Catholic Country SA (CCCSA), CSI Flinders has been awarded funding for the ‘Making it easy: A wayfinding app to support successful prisoner re-entry and reintegration’ project via the Department for Corrective Services, SA (DCS) Community Partnership Program.
The project will co-design, develop, and implement a digital ‘wayfinding’ app as a tool to connect social and health service providers and correctional staff (community corrections and prison) in Port Lincoln, in order to better assist individuals with post-prison reintegration and desistance journeys. The program aims to improve reintegration outcomes by enhancing the knowledge and efficiency of correctional staff and social and health service providers, thereby improving connection to available supports for those exiting prison. The project is informed by a strengths-based and assisted desistance approach, aligning staff to engagement methods that are known to better support processes of desistance.
This project builds upon the Beyond Bars study currently underway at CSI Flinders and Centacare Catholic Country SA. Beyond Bars analyses the problem of short custodial stays in two regional communities that house prisons (Port Lincoln and Port Augusta). One of the key findings arising from the study is that people exiting prison following short custodial stays have high levels of health and social needs, but that many of those needs are not being met. There is thus a need for more coordinated communication and collaboration between correctional services and the social and health service ecosystems. A proposed solution generated by participants (local government and non-government service providers) was a wayfinding program that reaches into correctional settings and connects to community. Wayfinding programs help establish effective pathways to community reintegration by bridging gaps in fragmented service provision, while utilising the already existing resources of a community.
Research team: Jenna Mizzi, Ian Goodwin-Smith, Caitlin Hughes, Mark Halsey, Melissa de Vel-Palumbo, Mark Ferraretto, Jen Cleary & Simone Deegan.
The team is thankful for the offer of in-kind support from West Coast Youth and Community Services and DCS.