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.
As such, the program presents a bit of a riddle. It’s not good that anyone is trapped in solitary confinement to start with, but since they are, does VR represent a tool to give them a little respite, or is it just a buzzy band-aid on a cruel practice?
Creative Acts seems at least a little squeamish about the tension itself, with a spokesperson telling us that “we consider our work [as] part of ending solitary confinement and changing how we, as a society, deal with serious harm beyond solely punishment, which we know does not work.”
Citing data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), a 2025 impact report by the group notes that, since the Corcoran program began, the total number of infractions received by those held in solitary confinement dropped from 735 to 1. Those numbers are hard to interpret, because the CDCR didn’t provide the nonprofit with any timeline for them, though Creative Acts told Futurism “it was pretty amazing even to get this figure.”
Still, the nonprofit feels that it’s managing to chip away at Corcoran’s solitary confinement practice as a whole.
“Because the prison sees such a dramatic change in infractions,” Creative Acts told Futurism, “they have commuted a lot of [solitary confinement] sentences and enabled them to go back to the [non-solitary housing]. So far the program has contributed to closing one of four [solitary] buildings.”
Some prison reform advocates aren’t convinced that VR headsets are the way forward, given the industrial scale of the US prison system. “At most, technologies like this can barely blunt the edge of the harm solitary confinement inflicts,” a Prison Policy Initiative spokesperson told us.
“The fact that solitary is so hard to get rid of — and the fact that so many people are still leaving prison directly from maximum security to the street, with few resources — points to the urgency of reducing the number of people we send to prison,” they urged. “But rolling out virtual reality technology in solitary is not the answer.”
On a certain level, it’s surprising that the VR program exists at all. Typically, visitation with outside guests and even other incarcerated people is heavily restricted if not banned for those in solitary, and opportunities to work or attend corrections classes are often denied.
Regardless, incarcerated people seem happy just to have meaningful programming, saying VR can offers a chance to practice coping skills, stress relief, and temporary escape from the dull horror of solitary confinement.
“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,” an incarcerated participant named Daniel Garcia told the Guardian. “VR helped us recognize those triggers.”
Still, it’d be better to build a system where nobody is kept in solitary confinement in the first place. For now, the American carceral system has created a world where it’s fine to lock people in a box for weeks on end — so long as we give them a few minutes with the fantasy goggles. Anthony Burgess, eat your heart out.
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