Right now in the US, the total population held in prison is nearly 2 million people, which is over 20 percent of the world’s prisoners. Of that massive number, over 122,000 US citizens are forced to endure solitary confinement for at least 22 hours a day.
Solitary confinement is the brutal practice of stuffing people into closet-sized rooms without sunlight, stimulation, or human contact for hours, days, weeks, and sometimes years or decades at a time. It’s a practice that amounts to torture, according to the United Nations and the Geneva Convention.
It’s no wonder why: research has shown that just hours of solitary confinement can cause serious and lasting psychological damage, potentially magnifying existing mental illness and significantly increasing a victim’s risk of suicide. All told, it’s a horrifying mark on an already dystopian carceral system.
Now take that grim situation and add a “Black Mirror”-esque wrinkle: prison officials in California are now offering some people held in solitary confinement an escape via virtual reality.
The program comes by way of Creative Acts, a social justice organization that leads art therapy workshops and educational initiatives in youth and adult prison systems. The nonprofit has previously used VR headsets as part of a general population reentry program, where incarcerated people visualize scenarios like their first steps outside the prison walls, before working through their emotional and physical response with volunteers.
The Guardian recently detailed how the program is working at Corcoran State Prison, where incarcerated people are plucked from 6ft by 11ft cells — where some had been for weeks — and chained to a metal seat inside of a “therapeutic module,” a metal cage no bigger than a phone booth.
From there, Creative Acts volunteers fit the participants with Oculus headsets, loaded up with a range of virtual programming ranging from a ride through Thailand on a rickshaw to a stroll down the streets of Paris. Let’s get it out of the way: the optics of prisoners in small cages, outfitted with VR headsets, are pretty bleak.
Hellbound and Down 