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.
Before Thailand, Royal had been held in the facility’s “restricted housing unit”, or solitary confinement. There, the only opportunity incarcerated people typically have to speak with each other is through cell vents or across the yard during recreation. Typically for this program, participants in solitary sit inside individual cells the size of phone booths known as “therapeutic modules”. In Royal’s facility, she and fellow participants were separated by plastic dividers, and each participant was shackled to a metal seat attached to a table.
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.
Now released, Carlos Ortega went through the virtual reality program in March of last year while in solitary confinement at Corcoran state prison. At 6ft tall, he remembers needing to sit down on the provided stool within the solitary cage to immerse himself in the VR scenes, even though the headset’s 360-degree view was programmed to work within the cage’s confines.
“If you’re not mindful of your body in prison, that can lead to conflict. We’re always aware of the amount of space we have, so I didn’t fidget a lot,” he shares. Ortega rarely bumped into the walls, carefully moving his torso and neck in order to take in his surroundings. “It was difficult, but we worked with what we got.”
Freedom within – and from – a controlled environment
“The micro environment is really, really controlled,” Ortega goes on to explain. Even when he would try to initiate interaction with prison guards, he would get shut down. “I would always say, ‘Hey, good morning. How was your drive here? How are you doing?’ I’d mostly get a glare or a look like ‘Why do you care?’ It’s kind of humiliating.”
Creative Acts seeks to work against this hardened environment. The California-based organization relies on the arts as a resource for behavioral change and practical preparation for coming home from prison. With VR in four institutions – Valley state prison (VSP), Kern Valley state prison, Corcoran state prison and the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) – the organization has more requests coming in from other California facilities. Plans to expand beyond the state, however, can not be fulfilled due to lack of funding, according to Williams.
Williams first had the idea to bring VR into prisons five years ago. After founding Creative Acts in 2018, she said she “got real tired of hearing people come home after life sentences, having done multiple decades inside, and literally landing on a different planet”. She felt there was an urgent need for her organization to visually puncture the concrete barriers separating incarcerated people from the outside world. “As the world was changing out here, we missed it,” said Star Van Pool, Creative Acts’ program facilitator, who was incarcerated for 17 years.
So when Williams heard about a rudimentary VR program led by correctional officers in another state, she began to workshop how her organization could safely and humanely adapt this work. “I was looking for something that would bring the outside world inside. I heard that VR works on your brain as if you’ve had the experience,” Williams said. “It seemed like an ideal tool.”
Breathing through the overwhelming emotions of the everyday
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.
Williams says that the programming is not about therapizing or diagnosing anyone; it’s about providing them with the tools to feel and be aware of their own emotions in an otherwise repressive environment. Daniel Garcia, a participant incarcerated at Valley state prison in rural central California, got upset experiencing a scene in which a person bumped into him on a crowded street in Los Angeles. Following a breathing exercise while still in VR, Garcia said he was able to calmly consider how he might better resolve this type of conflict. “A lot of us, when we do come to prison, we’re not aware of the triggers from traumatic experiences that we’ve had, so we just react. VR helped us recognize those triggers.” Introducing this level of emotional awareness supports participants in coping and responding differently because, as Van Pool shares, “if a person doesn’t even understand why they’re angry or where it came from, they can’t change their behavior”.
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.”
As a responsive exercise, Creative Acts gives participants physical masks to paint. On the outside o the mask they’re asked to portray how they believe society perceives them; on its inside, how they see themselves. On his mask, Garcia wrote “condemned” with cracks on the outside, to reflect his sentence of life without parole. “But I want to be bigger than that,” he said, “so on the inside I painted a sunset, full of life, so bright.”
Working through ‘a lot of pain’ in virtual reality
Reflecting on her experience in VR six months ago, Royal shares that she initially “saw a lot of pain” when the group started. “But by the end, I saw smiles on the faces of all these women and the ability to trust somebody again,” she said. Released from solitary confinement within two months after donning the headset, Royal still conducts unified breathwork she learned from the program with people in the prison if she senses conflict.
Garcia similarly retains his meditation practice, oftentimes putting in earbuds to quiet his surroundings, slowly counting while envisioning a sunset. Matias Magana, another program participant at Valley State, shares that now he says hello to individuals he never would have spoken to had it not been for his Creative Acts group. For him, “we’re breaking cultural boundaries”. And Ortega, who spoke sporadically on a Tuesday when he had gone to Creative Acts’ office to pick up some of his old art, says that he now finds himself “being comfortable in the uncomfortable”. His birthday was the second to last day of his Creative Acts’ experience; he still has the sticky notes the facilitators put on his “therapeutic module” with birthday wishes from everyone.
Closing a solitary unit after virtual reality workshops
In response to Creative Acts programming, facilities are witnessing an immense change. “Prison is toxic. You become accustomed to it: the corruption, the duplicitousness. Hell is normalized,” Ortega said. But prisons that have piloted the VR program report a 96% reduction in infractions from incarcerated participants in solitary confinement, according to Creative Acts. Corcoran state prison in rural central California saw the number of infractions of the men in solitary go from 735 to one after one week-long session. One of Corcoran wardens commuted so many solitary confinement sentences that the facility closed one of its four buildings dedicated to the practice.
The organization attributes this level of transformation to the role that art plays in encouraging people to redirect their anger, share and process their trauma, and envision, quite literally with the help of VR, a world beyond the bars that confine them.
Pros and cons of tech in prisons
Introducing new technology into prisons has inspired skepticism as well as praise. Making available tablets with texting, email and books en masse in prisons has also made way for another predatory profit channel for companies, increased the ability to further surveil incarcerated people, and created false promises of more connection or education. Many argue that tech is just a bandage solution that only serves to maintain an inhumane carceral system. Others say that working with the same prisons that continue to incarcerate people in droves cannot possibly benefit those inside. Williams has grappled with these critiques.
“Anything can be used to cause harm, [and] people will always make money off of anything that goes into prisons, so the benefits for the people inside, to me, outweigh the issues,” Williams says when discussing the introduction of tablets and other technology inside prisons. For the Creative Acts’ founder, the key to administering VR is by utilizing team members who have endured incarceration themselves to thoughtfully facilitate the experience as well as providing trauma-informed art exercises paired with every scene. As for criticisms about working with the California department of corrections and rehabilitation rather than against it, Williams has a consistent motto: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to make change? You can’t make deep cultural change without including the people that work there.”
Still, the non-profit must go the financial and physical lengths of bringing VR inside prisons while many of the scenes that participants interact with in their headsets are just on the other side of their cell walls. However, participants said the small doses of virtual freedom and exposure to the outside world shifted their behaviors and perceptions more than solitary confinement ever did.
“I learned that, even if someone has nothing in common with me, I can find a way to connect with them,” Royal shares. She will parole from prison in May and feels more confident in her ability to build a community for herself. For Ortega, Creative Acts laid an emotional foundation that informs the work he’s doing upon release. “I feel content, I’m more tolerant, people call me reliable again. I go to AA and NA meetings, I’m in school. I actually started my own program. It’s called Dream Catchers. I’m trying to catch that dream that I didn’t catch before.”
