AI keywork at national scale: more than 75,000 sessions a year
Officers at HMP Parc, HMP Rye Hill, HMP Oakwood and HMP Five Wells run keywork sessions with Purple Scribe drafting the write-up for officer review, giving staff back the hours once lost to manual note-taking. At HMP Rye Hill, keywork capacity per officer rose 25% and performance climbed nearly 40%.
87%
Reduction in administrative burden
75,000+
Keywork sessions processed
98%
Increase in high-quality sessions
The Challenge
Keywork is one of the most important things a prison officer does. Regular one-to-one sessions help people in custody resolve issues, track their progress and build the relationships that make establishments safer. But every session must be documented. Traditional note-taking meant interrupting conversations to scribble notes, then spending hours turning them into formal records.
The administrative burden meant staff devoted more time to paperwork than to the people they support. The quality of session records depended on each individual officer's writing ability.
What We Did
In 2024 Purple Scribe was deployed to remove the documentation burden. Officers record sessions on secure mobile devices and receive structured write-ups for review, with audio destroyed automatically after upload. Staff review and approve every record before it is submitted to the national offender database, keeping a human in the loop throughout.
In 2025 the Purple Scribe Keyworker Continuous Improvement Tool followed, developed through two years of collaboration with prison staff. It gives key workers constructive feedback after each session on strengths and areas to improve.
Purple Scribe is in daily keywork use at HMP Parc, HMP Rye Hill, HMP Oakwood and HMP Five Wells.
The Results
- 87% reduction in administrative burden, with write-ups produced six times faster than manual drafting
- More than 75,000 keywork sessions processed, with volume stable year over year
- 98% increase in high-quality sessions: sessions scored as good nearly doubled from 694 to 1,379
- 38% reduction in low-quality sessions
- At HMP Rye Hill, keywork capacity per officer rose 25% and performance climbed nearly 40%
Products Behind This Deployment
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