James Tweed has always been fascinated by the act of learning in isolation. Having started life as a maritime derivatives trader, he founded his company to provide education for people on ships, where there was “not a lot of internet,” he says. In recent years, he discovered a new cohort of learners who also can’t get online: prisoners.
Today, Coracle Online Ltd has distributed 2,600 laptops loaded with educational software to most of Britain’s prisons, or about one for every 30 prisoners. The results may well show that digital education can have an edge when it cuts out the distraction of the internet.
For all the potential that online learning brings, with platforms like Google Classroom distributing coursework more efficiently, a constant internet connection also comes with noise. Learners who are connected to the web are more likely to struggle to stay focused on the task at hand, whether that’s due to their phones or web-connected Chromebooks.
Little wonder that banning phones from classrooms can improve grades, or that high school teachers say their students now find it more exhausting to read long text without regular breaks. Recent studies recommend that when educators teach something online, they should interact with students more to keep their attention, and students must turn their cameras on to stay accountable.
Compare that with trying to get an education in prison, which until now has been like something out of the Stone Age. Effectively, it’s distance learning with pen and paper. The Chromebooks that Coracle distributes to prisoners offer something more reminiscent of those pre-internet days of Encyclopedia Britannica CDs.
Plenty of varied educational content, but locked down from the internet for security reasons, such as preventing them from planning illegal activities or contacting victims. Prisoners who use Coracle Chromebooks typically spend a few hours each day on their devices in their cells, reading journal articles or watching videos from higher-education courses provided by other academic institutions.
The one drawback of being offline is that if they want to go deeper on a topic like criminal justice, the inmates have no hyperlinks to click on to read more. Some prisoners found this frustrating, according to Paul Hamilton, one of the authors of a recent study by Nottingham Trent University, which followed five prisoners using Coracle’s laptops.
Even so, all of them completed the course and their assessments, “often with high grades,” says Hamilton. The benefits aren’t just improved prospects for employment once they get parole, but a greater sense of empowerment, agency and confidence. Fuzzy concepts, but crucial ones for integrating back into society and staving off the risk of reoffending.
The US already has broader efforts in place to teach prisoners with digital devices, with several states pursuing schemes that distribute tablets and Zoom lessons, though some charge high prices and appear exploitative.
One organization, called The Last Mile, says that graduates of its digital courses on topics like coding and web development have a recidivism rate of about 4%, a fraction of the national rate of 61%. Several alumni have landed jobs in the tech industry with companies including Slack, Zoom and Dropbox, and its learners never have direct access to the internet.
There are no clear-cut solutions in criminal justice. Even with the Nottingham Trent study, which took place between 2023 and 2024, one participating inmate dropped out at the very beginning, and another said he spent the first two weeks with his Chromebook playing chess. But he eventually delved into the course and completed it like the others.
The evidence is clear that educating prisoners works. In the UK, around three-fifths of incarcerated people leave prison without employment or education, yet research shows that when prisoners participate in some form of education, recidivism rates fall by between 20% and 40%.
With any luck, Coracle can secure more deals with the British prison system, which operates as Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, and expand its educational content so it’s less like a limited version of Encyclopedia Britannica and more like a ring-fenced microcosm of the web. Over time, its participating inmates might find their isolation from the web’s never-ending diversions comes with an advantage.
Hamilton notes that some of his students sometimes do a year’s placement as prison officers. “The spooky thing is that when they finish… they say the most liberating thing about working in the prison is that, ‘I don’t have my phone,’” Hamilton says. “‘I don’t have that noise of social media.’” That is an obvious bonus—one that should be capitalized on. ©bloomberg