Al the Bot: Support for Current Prison Inmates
According to a Simmons School of Social Work article, 66% of former prison convicts are re-incarcerated within 3 years of being released. Rather than re-educating former criminals to become better citizens, the numbers show that prison is decreasing their opportunities in life. In order to address this issue, we decided to create our chat bot, Al. Al provides help and support for current prisoners in many different aspects, from becoming a better job candidate for the future to leading a healthy diet. The following post will show you the complete design process that we followed to attempt to address the very serious issue posed by mass incarceration in the US.
Problem
Within a few years of being released, people commit crimes repeatedly and go back to prison. It is hard for them to find employment and to have a normal life due to their past behavior and the remainders of it. This is due to factors such as difficulty finding employment, forgetting how to live in society, low education, limited work experience etc. Ex-Prisoners who aren’t imprisoned again are those that have family to support them on the outside, are able to find employment, and are able to be financially stable once they leave. These are the things we want to stress to inmates as integral to maintaining a crime-free life.
Group
Our chat bot is targeted towards current prison inmates that are close to being released. They can expect to integrate back into society and increase their chances of living a normal life once they are free from prison.
Goals
Our goal is to provide support and training for inmates. Since they don’t have access to many resources, we want to provide information on future job opportunities, tell them how to make contact with family who can provide support, teach them how to be financially stable, help them deal with post-prison depression, and more.
Platform
Although we will be using Slack or Facebook for academic purposes, this would not be a realistic platform to use in a prison environment, since inmates have limited or no access to mobile devices at all. In a more realistic scenario, we would possibly implement an application for this sole purpose and activate it in a computer with no access to any network.
Ideation
Our complete conversation flowchart can be found here.
Al introduces himself
We started out by writing out an introductory conversation for our bot. It was hard to establish a conversation with our demographic, since we could not rely on our classmates to test it. We decided to trust our intuition and figured that distracting them from their reality would be the most effective way to address the problem. Along the way, we kept in mind that our goal with every single message was to not remind them that they were in prison. Our chat bot would serve as a support for the future as well as an escape from the current reality. With this idea in mind, we wrote an introductory conversation that focused on getting to know the person better.
The actual purpose
A thought that we had was that prison inmates might not have too much time to interact with a virtual support giver. For this reason, the introduction was short and we got straight to the point. We aimed to ask a question that would make them think outside the box, which was perfect in our attempt to always make them forget their current reality and think of the near future. “What is your biggest goal on the outside?” This is a very hard question for anyone, and especially for some people that due to psychological issues might have lost all hope. To make it easier for them as well as for us in the implementation of the chat bot, we decided to stick to some options that were broad enough for them to be able to pick wisely:
- Family and friends
- Financial stability
- To live a healthy life
- To get an education
- To have a stable job
After the user has picked their biggest goal, the following different paths were followed.
Family and friends
Over 60% of released prison inmates end up back in prison within 2 years. This is due to a variety of factors, like a lack of financial security/job, no familial support, and lack of education. each of which we hit with our categories of goals that we have the user select. However, many of these issues can be solved with the help of a support network like family and friends. So, with this part of the conversation, we attempted to inform the user on how to find their family (since many inmates who are released after 40 or 50 year sentences have lost all contact with the outside world) by use of modern technologies that they may not know about or may not understand. The most notable of these is the internet, which, since they may not be able to afford a computer initially, we inform the user is free to use at local libraries. We tell the user to create a Facebook account and input their information because it is amazing what Facebook can do with just a little information to find all of your old friends and families. This is the best and easiest way to find and contact lost relatives in the modern world, but we still kept in mind the fact that an older prisoner may have a tough time with this process. So we created an optional flow that the user can go down that informs them of physical resources to find people, such as searching old records at a library and enlisting a librarian’s help.
The next important point we needed to hit for the user was how to act when they finally see their families again. This can be a difficult and tense transition and we felt that the best way to deal with this was making sure the prisoner had an open mind and made sure that their family had the same open mind. Because it’s going to take time and effort on both sides, the best piece of advice they could heed is maintaining their patience and working with their family to make sure everybody understands each other and knows that their hearts are in the right place.
Financial stability
This conversation path serves to give advice to the user about spending money, and managing money. This option allows the user to acquire tips with a simple response, and can loop infinitely to the user’s discretion.
Healthy lifestyles
We had the user input their body type into the system through messaging the chat bot. Depending on their choices, the user would receive a hyperlink card that would redirect them to a certain web page on the internet if they chose to click that.
Education
We all knew how hard it is to decide if we should go to school and where to go. For this reason, we wanted to avoid providing advice ourselves. One idea was to implement an HTTP request using Flow XO, and using a college finder website to search a list of the most perfect fits. The problem with this would come in two ways: the device used would have no access to network and this presented technical limits when we attempted to implement it. For these reasons and time constraints, we decided not to implement our idea of this.
Stable job
We thought this option should require a bit more effort, since it is one of the bigger life goals that society has taught us to aim for. For this reason, this path asks multiple background questions with the purpose of constructing a real resume in only a few minutes. This path is also closely tied to the Education path described before, as the user could potentially have the option to learn about education opportunities to increase their chances of being hired.
The end purpose of this path was to provide an initial draft of a resume. We thought that showing the inmates all of their skills in one single message and in a professional format would create a self-esteem and motivation boost. If this was achieved, we then knew that we had done our job right. This path is an especially tense section of our chatbot, since user testing during demo day proved that this is the one most people go to.
Final Prototype
As mentioned before, we decided to use Facebook as our platform to make the demo day as well as user testing easier to accomplish. This video contains some of our main conversational aspects.
In order to test the chat bot yourself you can join this Slack channel and message the Al App directly.
Things to Improve
One of the hardest challenges presented by this project was to make our chatbot seem human. As it is, our chatbot seems very robotic and too nice for an actual person. The problem with this is that we are trying to reach a goal in a very short amount of time, which makes it hard to establish a real conversation. This is something that could be fixed with more user testing as well as a deeper analysis of our demographic.
We ran into several issues with the limited network access that prison inmates would have in a realistic scenario. For this reason, there were some inconsistencies that we had lots of difficulty handling in our design. We strongly relied on external resources and web pages in order to provide the user the information they were requesting. However, as was mentioned earlier, this is something that would not be feasible in a real scenario. With more time and research we would have been able to integrate all of the relevant information directly into our chat bot in order to provide information directly and without third party dependencies.
Since it was impossible for us to survey current prison inmates with such short amount of time, we were not able to establish what type of personality an actual prison inmate might open to more. Other aspects that could be improved include things that require user testing with a realistic sample, as well as a deeper and more thorough analysis of the best support fit for a current prison inmate.