AI must widen who gets to shape the economy

Guest contributor: Pratik Doshi, Breakthrough Social Enterprise

When people talk about AI in criminal justice, the conversation often begins with efficiency: faster assessments, better information-sharing and stretched services doing more with less. Those questions matter. But for Black and Global Majority communities, the more urgent question is power. Will AI widen access to the future economy, or make old inequalities faster and harder to challenge?

Breakthrough starts from lived experience. Our CEO, Sobanan Narenthiran, and several members of our team have direct experience of the justice system. Sobanan has been talking about AI and future economies since he was in prison. He tried to get other prisoners thinking about how technology would change work, and how they could participate rather than emerge into another economy designed without them.

That belief now shapes our work. We have delivered digital, employability and AI learning in London prisons. We are one of the few UK organisations focused specifically on helping underserved communities build practical AI capability. We also help SMEs and charities upskill their teams in AI: identifying where it can reduce administration, improve communication, strengthen services and release staff time for human work. We teach practical use alongside privacy, bias, verification and the limits of automated judgement.

For someone approaching release, AI can support career research, CV development, interview practice, learning and testing a business idea. For a small charity, it can create capacity that would otherwise be unaffordable. But a tool is only useful when people have the confidence, access and relationships to turn it into opportunity. A course that ends at the prison gate is not inclusion.

Some AI systems may need to be paused when safeguards, evidence or accountability are missing. But AI education for underserved communities cannot be paused. Their voices must be in the conversation now, before the rules, investments and opportunities of the new economy are decided without them.

Three tests for justice technology

Agency: Does it help people build skills, income and choices, or mainly help institutions monitor them?
Accountability: Can a person understand, question and appeal a decision influenced by the system?
Investment: Are community organisations and lived-experience leaders funded to shape delivery, or merely consulted after decisions are made?

The future economy should not be designed around justice-affected people and then delivered to them. They must help build it, and share in the money, justice and repair it creates.

AI must widen who gets to shape the economy

Three tests for justice technology

Further reading