Prisons using virtual reality goggles to help inmates cope with solitary confinement

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One Monday in July, Samantha Tovar, known as Royal, left her 6ft-by-11ft cell for the first time in three weeks. Correctional officers escorted her to the common area of the Central California Women’s Facility and chained her hands and feet to a metal table, on top of which sat a virtual reality headset. Two and a half years into a five-year prison sentence, Royal was about to see Thailand for the first time.

When she first put on the headset, Royal immediately had an aerial view of a cove. Soon after, her view switched to a boat moving fairly fast with buildings on either side of the water. In the boat was a man with a backpack, and it was as if she were sitting beside him. With accompanying meditative music and narration, the four-minute scene took Royal across a crowded Thai market, through ancient ruins, on a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled rickshaw) and into an elephant bath with her backpacked companion. For Royal, these vignettes felt real enough to be deserving of a passport stamp.

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In the seven-day intensive VR program, participants experience scenes from daily life, as well as some more adventurous ones such as traveling to Paris or paragliding, for four hours each day. Facilitators ask them to process emotions that come from these scenes through various art exercises involving theater tactics, poetry, painting, etc.

“The VR stirs up the triggers and the trauma and the emotions – and then the art transforms,” Sabra Williams, the founder of Creative Acts, the organization behind the program, shares. The non-profit conducts the program both in general population and in solitary.

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It took a year for Creative Acts to persuade Meta to donate 20 headsets and two of its Cleanbox headset sanitation machines for a VR pilot. Meanwhile, Creative Acts’ Alumni Lab worked with content makers including Unincarcerated Productions to produce scenes reflecting the collective fears and curiosities that arise when preparing to come home from prison, such as exiting the facility on release day, conducting a job interview or going on a date.

For Major Bunton, Creative Acts’ director of programming, the big fear was paying for groceries. “If I’m sitting in line, swiping my credit card, and I can’t get it done, the first thing that comes to my mind is ‘Oh my God, someone’s going to know I’ve been incarcerated,’” he said.

To film a Thanksgiving dinner scene, Williams made an entire meal – “I cooked a terrible turkey,” she quipped – and brought in actors to demonstrate various conflicts that could come up when interacting with a loved one who has just come home from prison. When a person puts on the VR headset to experience this scene, it is as if they are at the table. “When I came home, I had to realize that my family had changed. I had to learn how to adapt to their lives,” Bunton shares. “And conversely, they saw me as the person I was when I went in 20 years ago.” Williams’ goal is for participants to get a handle on the rollercoaster of emotions that comes after long-term separation through these family-conflict scenes.

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The transformative scene for Ortega was sitting around the Eiffel Tower. “You see tourists, regular people going to and from work,” he said. “And that’s when it hit me: I want to live life like that. I deserve it. I owe it to myself.”

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