10 Free Warcraft for Ex-Cons

The US currently has 2.2 million prisoners at any given time, more than any other country in the world. And according to the USDOJ, 67.5% of released criminals are rearrested for felonies within the next three years. After subtracting out the 128,000 inmates currently serving life sentences, we are looking at approximately 1.47 million of those 2.2 million being rearrested within the next three years.

Now, we know that the cost of the federal government housing a prisoner comes out to $23476.80 per year. So here is my brilliant plan to reduce recidivism rates and save the taxpayers money: whenever a career criminal is released back into society, give them a copy of World of Warcraft and a free 1 year subscription. This works out to around $160 per person, but I'm sure the government could swing a pretty good volume discount. At this rate, the cost of housing one prisoner for a year works out to around 150 WoW subscriptions.

Simple math tells us that if we could reduce recidivism by just 1%, we could save the taxpayers a huge amount of money, not to mention reduce the level of violent crime in society. And when you consider the average WoW player logs almost eight hours a day, this seems like a very real possibility.

Of course you might say, "But Alex, won't giving career criminals an addictive video game prevent them from getting real jobs?" Yes! But don't forget that the career of a career criminal is committing crime, so this is exactly the idea.

The paper by Yee & Balenson suggests that by tweaking the appearance of the avatar, we can alter the way in which the user behaves. Although further testing is needed, this result suggests that we could potentially rehabilitate criminals by encouraging prosocial behavior online. The authors also talk about SIDE theory in this context. Perhaps by giving prisoners a positive social identity and deindividuating them, we could train them in good behavior. The authors do note precedence for this, saying that people in a dark room were more likely to engage in acts of physical affection, showing that deindividuation can lead to good behavior as well as bad.

As Raph Koster says, "Glory is the reason why people play online; shame is what keeps them from playing online. Neither is possible without other people being present." Perhaps by creating a compelling online experience for former criminals we can subconsciously rehabilitate them, or at the very least keep them in front of the computer. After all, better to have them killing dragons in real game than raping little kids in real life.

While it is only a small part of the picture, I believe that Yee & Bailenson provide an excellent framework for creating a prosocial experience through both their work on Proteus theory and also their new results using the existing SIDE model.