AI to predict prisoner attacks on officers
They will deploy AI to more accurately assess the risk that criminals pose so that they could be transferred to high-security jails, segregated or placed in special separation units.
AI will also be used to uncover prisoners' secret communications by scanning the data in confiscated phones for codewords and signals for drug dealing, drone drops and threats of violence.
They are part of an 'action plan' by ministers to embed AI in the criminal justice system, from AI assistants for all civil servants to process information and write reports to judges seeking to distil evidence and compose decisions.
It comes after it emerged prison officers are still waiting for stab vests nearly two months after the Government announced that they would be issued.
The decision was made after after three officers were attacked with makeshift knives by Hashem Abedi, the Manchester Arena terrorist.
On Thursday, figures will be released expecting to confirm a record rise in violence in prisons.
Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, said: 'These tools are already fighting violence in prisons, tracking offenders, and releasing our staff to focus on what they do best: cutting crime and making our streets safer.'
The AI violence predictor analyses different factors such as a prisoner's age, drug use, type of offences and previous involvement in violent incidents while in custody.
It will enable prison officers to assess threat levels on wings and intervene or move inmates before violence escalates.
Another AI tool will be able to digitally scan the contents of mobile phones seized from prisoners to quickly flag messages that could provide intelligence on potential crimes being committed behind bars, such as secret codes associated with drugs or planned violence.
It will help staff to discover potential threats of violence to other inmates or prison officers as well as plots to escape or smuggle in weapons or contraband via drones.
This technology, which uses AI-driven language analysis, has already been trialled across the prison estate and has analysed more than 8.6 million messages from 33,000 seized phones.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) also plans to create a single digital ID for all offenders with AI helping to link separate records across courts, prisons and probation for the first time.
This will match records that may never be linked through old search systems due to slight typos or missing words, which will ensure prisons, probation and courts have full details on any offender to ensure they are properly monitored and correctly sentenced.
Probation officers have started using AI to speed up searching for information, note-taking, drafting and redacting reports. It has already reduced time on paperwork by 50 per cent to give them more time to focus on face-to-face interviews and assessments of offenders' risk.
Every member of staff in MoJ will have a secure AI assistant to help them draft emails, summarise documents, manage their inboxes, redact information and generate reports.
Staff already have access to a Copilot Chat, AI software and ChatGPT which is already saving them 30 minutes a day and freeing up time for 'higher value' work.
'What used to take me half a day now takes 20 minutes. I've clawed back hours each week just by getting help with the first draft, the structure, or even just thinking through a problem,' said one.
A digital assistant is being developed to help families resolve child arrangement disputes outside of court while AI is being deployed to tailor education and training programmes to suit the individual needs of prisoners.
In June, Ms Mahmood also invited two dozen tech companies to pitch ideas for wearable technologies, behaviour monitoring and geolocation to create a 'prison outside of prison'.
She told the tech companies she wants 'deeper collaboration between government and tech to solve the prison capacity crisis, reduce reoffending and make communities safer'.
Ms Mahmood invited them to 'scale and improve' the existing use of tagging 'not just for monitoring but to drive rehabilitation and reduce crime'.
The initiative is the latest sign of the Government's embrace of the technology industry to help deliver efficiency savings in creaking public services from schools to hospitals.
In January, Sir Keir Starmer declared that AI was a way 'to transform our public services' and spoke about 'totally rewiring government'.
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