Atorrus Rainer, age 41, is standing in the center of a stuffy, fluorescent-lit room. A virtual-reality headset covers his eyes like oversize goggles. Every so often, he extends his arm, using the VR controller to pick up garbage bags, a toothbrush, and toilet paper during a simulated trip to the supermarket. The experience is limited—Rainer has to follow a pre-written shopping list and can only travel to specific locations within the empty store—but the sheer number of products available, even in this digital world, still overwhelms him. So does the self-checkout station: those didn't exist in 2001, when Rainer, then a teenager, was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. His first experience with one is this virtual interaction taking place inside Fremont Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison about two hours south of Denver.
Rainer is practicing in the hopes of stepping into a real store in the near future through an initiative launched in Colorado in 2017 in response to US Supreme Court rulings that deemed juvenile life without parole sentences unconstitutional. [...]
The premise of JYACAP is that learning the basic skills they missed the chance to acquire while incarcerated will provide these juvenile lifers with their best chances for success upon release. That's a formidable challenge. Because of safety concerns, they have had limited access to the internet. Though they're now adults, many have never used, or even seen, a smartphone or a laptop. Or had a credit card. "We had to figure out a way of giving them these opportunities in a restricted environment," says Melissa Smith, interim director of prisons for the Colorado Department of Corrections.
[...] Is VR the long-missing piece in an unwieldy puzzle of resources and programs meant to help reverse these statistics? Or is it yet another experiment that will fail to adequately prepare incarcerated individuals for life beyond lockup? "It's not going to be the silver bullet, but it is a tool that I think is very powerful for a lot of people, because they never really get a chance to practice what we're trying to teach them," says Bobbie Ticknor, an associate professor of criminal justice at Valdosta State University. "I think we should use everything we can find and see what works the best."
Proponents like Ticknor say VR can immerse incarcerated people in the sights and sounds of modern life and help them develop digital literacy in a secure corrections environment. "When you're role-playing, when you're learning a new skill, the closer you can bring them to doing what they're actually going to have to do out in the real world, the better," says Ethan Moeller, founder and managing director of Virtual Training Partners, which helps organizations successfully implement virtual-reality tools. "VR does that better than any other training medium."
Others are more skeptical. Like Dr. Cyndi Rickards, an associate teaching professor at Drexel University who leads weekly criminology courses inside Philadelphia prisons. People who are incarcerated wear the "label of inmate on their back. It's a dehumanizing system," she says, "so to suggest that VR is going to reintegrate them into society after being in a punitive system...just further objectifies folks, it continues a pattern of dehumanizing folks, and I've not read any compelling evidence that this is the route we should use to integrate people to be members of a healthy and contributing society."
[...] VR has proved a beneficial therapeutic tool, helping to lower depression rates, reduce anxiety, conquer phobias, promote emotional empathy, and address post-traumatic stress. VR exposure therapy has been successfully used to help vulnerable populations such as veterans and sexual-assault survivors confront, and better cope with, their triggers and trauma. All that research is based on interventions done with people who are not incarcerated, however.
[...] While Valdosta State's Ticknor estimates that fewer than 10% of corrections facilities are currently using VR simulators with incarcerated individuals, she expects that to change soon. "I would be very surprised within five years if this is not a very regular treatment modality for this particular population," she says.
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Hospital and university clinics have historically helped people post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and phobias using virtual reality to immerse them in simulations that help them reckon with the problem. It was the foundation of a US Army program called BraveMind ( https://medvr.ict.usc.edu/projects/bravemind.html ). It is a virtual version of the longstanding technique called exposure therapy, in which people confront memories or fears, such as fear of flying or confined spaces - done actively with a therapist. However, a limited number of virtual-reality scenarios are available, and many patients must go to a specialized clinic for such care. Last week in the Wall Street Journal, they covered that researchers are aiming to make immersive VR-based therapy more personal and bring it into people's homes.
Full Story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/confronting-your-fears-in-virtual-reality-therapy-1b4200d
The future of this technology will certainly almost certainly involve home care, large language models, and generative content scaled to the users' appropriate level...
Related: Inmates are Using VR to Learn Real-world Skills
(Score: 2, Interesting) by vistic on Saturday April 29, @01:31AM (4 children)
VR in prisons?
Surely there isn't a coming dystopia where for-profit privately owned prisons realize they can save money on cell space by strapping prisoners to a chair with a mandatory VR helmet strapped to their heads 24/7 giving them a virtual prison cell to enjoy.
No... humanity would surely never do something that twisted give the opportunity. Thats why we all have faith in humanity and basic goodness and decency.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, @03:21AM (1 child)
Wait until they put those goggles on and see that their jailer is Zuckerberg's avatar, because he took money from a private prison to set up in the "Metaverse."
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday April 29, @10:46PM
I would say that's cruel and unusual punishment, but on second thoughts anything involving that guy and his organizations is very usual for most people, more's the pity.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday April 29, @04:28AM
Wouldn't that just be house arrest?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday April 29, @01:34PM
Hey, mandatory advertising with a literal captive audience. It's everything that would make a modern advertising exec jizz their pants.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Saturday April 29, @03:20AM (2 children)
VR to teach them to use smartphones, laptops and the internet? Here's an idea. Buy some cheap laptops with no WiFi, use Ethernet to connect them to an internal network that has no way to reach the internet. Populate the laptops with LibreOffice and the internet with some dummy sites that mimic Google, Maps, Soylent, Amazon etc. Do NOT add any social media sites. In fact, part of their parole should be no social media. But I digress.
Grab the Doom source code and change the maps to a supermarket, the inventory a shopping list, and the gun a credit card. I'm sure some high school kid will do that for $100 and a 6 pack of Red Bull.
If they can use a laptop they can easily pick up a smartphone. Face it, if they're too stupid to pick that up on their own they're too stupid to abide by their parole conditions and they'll be back inside in no time.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Saturday April 29, @04:57AM (1 child)
People are coming out of prison who don't know how to pump gas any more.
A laptop is not a good training substitute for a smartphone, and a smartphone is part of joining the economy now. Even my side hustle of dog walking requires an app to track my time and route for the dog owner.
Being immersive accomplishes things that Doom on a laptop would not. Remember how overwhelmed the guy was in the virtual supermarket. It's a pattern I've read about in people who get out. Normal street scenes are sensory overload. Getting them used to that takes one obstacle out of the path to living as a normal citizen.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday April 29, @09:01PM
> People are coming out of prison who don't know how to pump gas any more.
Uh, as in they forgot? I find that hard to believe. That's not a skill that's forgotten. Neither is it hard to learn in the first place.
> A laptop is not a good training substitute for a smartphone
Smartphones aren't hard to learn. They've been designed so that toddlers can use them, and even senior folks who are unfit to join the workforce with a bit of help. Apps, especially specialized ones for work, often need to be learned on a per-case basis and aren't worth teaching speculatively.
I can see VR being useful to train things like diving or residential electrical work though.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday April 29, @10:08AM
But I'm pretty sure it's considered inhumane torture to subject even hard-core criminals to the Facebook Metaverse. I bet half of them come out of the experience with psychological scars. Some might even beg for their life sentenced to be commuted to the death penalty.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday April 29, @12:07PM
Then use a real cashier. All the stores I shop at have real cashiers. I'd refuse to shop at a store that didn't. I only know of one around here that tried to go without (years ago anyway, haven't been back) and the place felt like one giant vending machine. I'll shop elsewhere. Fuck them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01, @02:11PM
What do you expect people to learn when you put a bunch of like minded people together?