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Inmates Are Using VR For A Chance To Get Out Of Prison

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Six men went to prison as teenagers in the ’80s and ’90s — now they’re learning to grocery shop through a headset.

At the Fremont Correctional Facility in Cañon City, Colorado, a group of long-serving inmates are strapping on virtual reality goggles for the first time in their lives, not to play a game but to relearn a world that moved on without them. Some were sentenced as teenagers to life without parole or decades-long terms during the 1980s and ’90s, long before smartphones, self-checkout lanes, or even modern debit cards existed. VICE News documented the program in 2017, following men preparing for a shot at freedom they never expected to see.

• Colorado built a three-year early-release track for people convicted as juveniles who have already served at least 20 years, a policy that followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling striking down mandatory life without parole for minors.
• At the medium-security Fremont facility, participants use VR headsets to practice grocery store navigation, self-checkout kiosks, and laundromat routines — everyday tasks they missed learning as teens.
• The simulations are also designed to desensitize inmates to sensory overload and stressful public interactions before they’re released on parole.

A Program Built on a Supreme Court Ruling

The legal groundwork for Fremont’s VR lab goes back to a string of Supreme Court decisions that began chipping away at harsh juvenile sentencing starting in 2005. The turning point came in 2012, when the Court ruled that mandatory life without parole for juveniles was unconstitutional. Colorado responded by creating a specialized three-year program that lets people convicted as minors — many now in their 40s and 50s after two decades or more inside — petition for early release.

That legal shift created an unusual population: men who entered the system before cell phones, the internet, or debit-card culture existed, and who now face release into a country they don’t recognize. The correctional system needed a way to close that gap quickly, and Fremont’s answer was strapping headsets onto men who, in some cases, had never touched a smartphone.

Inside Fremont’s VR Lab

The training scenarios are deliberately mundane. Inmates use headsets to walk simulated grocery store aisles, operate self-checkout kiosks, and figure out how a laundromat’s machines work — chores that anyone released after 20-plus years would otherwise have to learn cold, in public, under real stress. For men who left the outside world in the Reagan and Clinton eras, even a rotating aisle display or a card-swipe reader can be disorienting on a first encounter.

Some of these men haven’t pushed a shopping cart down a store aisle since before flip phones existed.

By running through the motions virtually first, participants get to make their mistakes — freezing up at a self-checkout screen, fumbling with a card reader — inside a padded, low-stakes simulation instead of in front of a line of impatient shoppers.

Training for Sensory Overload, Not Just Chores

The program isn’t only about functional skills. VICE’s report notes the VR sessions are also built to desensitize participants to crowded, noisy, unpredictable public spaces — the kind of sensory overload that can trigger panic or bad decisions for someone who hasn’t been in an open store or a busy street in decades. That’s treated as seriously as the practical training, since a stressful public encounter gone wrong could jeopardize a parole placement before it even begins.

It’s a strikingly different use of the same headset technology that shows up elsewhere in documentaries and features covering unconventional tools — here, the goal isn’t entertainment but survival prep for a world that added smartphones, social media, and self-checkout lanes while these men were locked away.

The Critical Stakes for These Men

The men profiled aren’t hypothetical case studies — they’re specific individuals who spent 20-plus years inside for crimes committed as teenagers, now facing a parole board that will decide whether their VR-tested skills translate to actual freedom. Fremont’s medium-security setting gives them a controlled environment to fail safely before that hearing, a contrast to harsher facilities elsewhere where rehabilitation programs are far more limited.

For these participants, the headset sessions are a rehearsal for a single shot: walk into a grocery store, work a self-checkout without freezing, do a load of laundry without a corrections officer standing over them, and prove to a parole board that two decades of separation from modern life hasn’t left them unable to function in it.