Global Tel Link (GTL), the huge prison-contracting big that provides tech starting from telecommunications programs to cost providers for correctional amenities throughout the U.S., might have discovered one other solution to squeeze extra change out of incarcerated individuals making contact with the skin world.

As Vice first reported, Global Tel Link (GTL) not too long ago filed a patent that describes a “system and method for personalized virtual reality experience in a controlled environment.” It continues, “A system and method for initiating a personalized virtual reality session via a virtual reality communication system in a controlled environment is disclosed.”

In impact, what this describes is a VR system by which incarcerated individuals might work together with others exterior the jail—VR visitation utilizing digital avatars, principally. Other attainable makes use of could possibly be permitting inmates “for a brief time, imagine himself outside or away from the controlled environment.”

GTL clearly intends the methods through which this method can be utilized to be fully on the whims of jail officers, who usually surveil any venue of entry to the skin. The patent describes a “monitoring system” that “continuously monitors visual information of the virtual reality session for any prohibited… actions performed by a user’s avatar that are determined by monitoring center to be inappropriate for a virtual reality session.”

The patent is listed as filed in September 2019, so any such product could possibly be a good distance off from being put in in prisons.

Prisons have by no means been a pleasant place to search out oneself, however in current many years the for-profit correctional amenities and jail contractors that make up the U.S.’s sprawling prison-industrial complex have eagerly cashed on what’s actually a captive market. For instance, GTL managed roughly 46%-53% of U.S. jail telecommunications contracts as of 2017. Both it and its major competitor Securus have been accused of utilizing their dominance to engage in price gouging.

The Federal Communications Commission intervened in May 2021 to hinder the apply of contractors shaking down inmates for cellphone calls, limiting out-of-state and worldwide calls to $0.12 per minute for prisons and $0.14 for jails. That didn’t restrict calls positioned inside a state, which stay horrifically overpriced. Research by the Prison Policy Initiative has discovered contractors charged extortionate charges for calls throughout the nation, with the worst instance being Arkansas, which charged as much as $25 for a 15-minute name from county- or city-run jails or $4.80 from a state jail in 2018. In one Oregon county, GTL charged nearly $18 for a 15-minute name. The Prison Policy Initiative says a lot of the charges are paid by families and are inflated by “kickbacks” contractors pay again to authorities establishments like correctional programs.

GTL has claimed to wish to scale back jail cellphone costs and attributes the excessive prices to issues like safety and offering corrections-grade tools. But the Orlando Sentinel reported this 12 months that households of Florida inmates have been livid at a brand new GTL contract with the state’s Department of Corrections that added a 99 cent flat-rate price to all pay as you go deposits and solely diminished per-minute charges by half a cent, to 13.5 cents. The contract additionally eradicated cheaper choices for calls positioned regionally.

In 2019, GTL was reported to be handing out tablets to inmates in West Virginia that it marketed as “free.” The {hardware} was free, however charges charged to inmates for utilizing the tablets have been jaw-dropping. Accessing content material value 5 cents a minute, video visitation value 25 cents a minute plus 25 cents per written message, picture attachments value 50 cents, and video attachments value a greenback. As the Prison Policy Initiative estimated in 2017 that West Virginia inmates made between 4 and 58 cents an hour, sending one picture might suck up 12.5 hours of labor.

As Motherboard noticed, VR has been used in prisons before for functions like expertise coaching and getting ready inmates scheduled for launch for his or her doubtlessly disorienting return to fashionable life after lengthy stretches behind bars. But it’s not arduous to think about a scenario through which VR visitation turns into simply one other excuse to suck each final dime out of incarcerated folks and their households and family members—particularly as a result of non-public prisons and their contractors have each incentive to interchange free, in-person visitation with remote-calling tech that they will cost astronomical charges for. As the Guardian reported in 2017, it has develop into extraordinarily widespread for U.S. prisons to take action, citing Prison Policy Initiative information that confirmed 74% of U.S. prisons that carried out distant visitation applications both diminished or eradicated in-person visits.

This is way from the one proposed use of VR within the correctional system that by some means manages to sound extra dystopian than the present-day amenities that maintain within the neighborhood of 2.3 million people throughout the U.S. on any given day.

A 2020 study by the Indiana School of Law and Social Equality proposed utilizing VR headsets to “provide a virtual environment in which the criminal is punished for the crime he or she commits,” with one instance being subjecting an inmate with arachnophobia to a punishment the place every day extra spiders have been added to a “virtual environment that completely mimicked his real-world jail cell.” (The research did word that “There is, of course, no precedent for this” and such punishments might run up towards the Punishments Clause of the Eighth Amendment but it surely advocated not less than discussing it.) Others have argued for virtual prisons, through which the use of bodily establishments can be restricted and changed by know-how like location monitoring and necessary solitude in VR headsets.