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United States Technology

Inmates Are Using VR To Learn Real-World Skills 36

Corrections systems are using simulators to provide incarcerated individuals with more lifelike instruction. But is it working? From a report: Atorrus Rainer, 41, is standing in the center of a stuffy room wearing a virtual-reality headset. 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 self-checkout station overwhelms him: 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. People who meet certain requirements -- for example, if they were under 21 when they committed felony crimes and have been incarcerated for a minimum of 20 to 30 years -- can apply to work through the three-year Juveniles and Young Adults Convicted as Adults Program (JYACAP) in an effort to earn early parole.

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. Though its use is not yet widespread, a handful of state corrections departments, from Ohio to New Mexico, have turned to virtual reality as an answer. The goals vary from helping reduce aggressive behavior to facilitating empathy with victims to, as in Colorado's case, reducing recidivism. Though the state's prison budget sits close to $1 billion, Colorado has one of the worst return-to-prison rates in the country, at around 50%. Nationally, as many as two-thirds of the 600,000 people released from state and federal prisons each year will be rearrested within three years.
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Inmates Are Using VR To Learn Real-World Skills

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  • by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @04:45PM (#63479182)
    ... erm, Real, real-world skills.
    • by dohzer ( 867770 )

      What's wrong with using fire-trucks to extinguish blazes, and using taxies to transport NPCs? They seem like real world skills to me.

  • and where is the VR prison so they do 700 years that some have to serve off.

    • by cstacy ( 534252 )

      and where is the VR prison so they do 700 years that some have to serve off.

      Maybe you're already in it right now.
      It's turtles all the way down, man!

      • If this guy got 100 years, he wasn't being charged with shoplifting, I'm guessing he killed someone, likely under very bad circumstances.

        I don't care if he was a juvenile, they should still throw away the key on these people.

        Not long back, in New Orleans...4 juveniles car jacked an elderly lady, I think she was in the 70's range.

        They were so brutal...they drug her out, leaving her arm tangled in the seatbelt and drug her in the car till her arm severed....and she bled to death in the street.

        They have vi

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @06:06PM (#63479356)

      > and where is the VR prison

      We prefer the term "cubicle". VR prison makes the workers anxious.

  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @05:59PM (#63479334)

    I was in a restroom that had automatically flushing toilets, some kind of IR sensor that notices when you leave. I had someone ask me how to flush the toilet. He explained that he had recently been released from a long prison stay and didn't know how to flush a modern toilet. He commented on how many simple things like that had changes while he was inside. I kind of felt sorry for him, good news is that most things got easier and all he had to do was walk away.

    • some time the IR sensors don't work that well even in places where you think they can do better like Las Vegas casinos

    • It's more surprising that he could piss without someone else watching him do it. At least the dude was trying to be considerate of other people and flush. Not everyone comes out of prison as conscientious.
      • He seemed nice enough, genuine, probably in his early 60s. More comfortable sparking up conversation at the urinal than me for sure, somehow I avoided publi-pee-a-phobia.

    • True enough. Knew of a guy that got released from prison in the early 2000s. He had been in since the Kennedy administration. He might as well been released to Alpha Centauri. That's several generations of technology just placed in his lap.

      Difficulty being prisons are havens for graft and corruption (not only inmates but the prisons themselves). Most can't even get bare minimum health care. I see several boondoggles arising from this.

    • It's a bad technology. It won't flush unless you step away. If you stand there trying to figure out how to flush it, it will never flush.

  • From the guy you didn't vote for last election

    America imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than almost any other country in the world, and minorities are disproportionately represented in this group. Incarceration doesn’t just set someone back for the time they’re imprisoned; with our current felony laws, they follow someone throughout their life. Mandatory minimum laws, the war on drugs, and other misguided policy decisions over the years passed by politicians with an eye towards bein

  • I don't pay back the virtual pod boss the virtual soups and virual honey bun that I owe him? Will I get virtually shanked?

  • It seems that the top course was "locksmith training."

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