Finnish prisons embrace AI training, reducing recidivism rates

For the past two years, prisoners in Finland have been participating in artificial intelligence (AI) annotation tasks, such as labelling and classifying data, as part of the rehabilitation programme. In collaboration with Metroc, a market data startup, the initiative aims to reduce recidivism by equipping prisoners with skills valuable in the contemporary world.

Instead of traditional "prison tasks" like sewing, cleaning, or laundry, inmates in three closed prisons in Finland (two male and one female) were offered the opportunity to try digital work. AI systems require human input in their development, especially for languages like Finnish, which are spoken by only five million people worldwide.

Jussi Virnala, founder of Metroc, explained to Euronews: "As our software tries to interpret text material and different details about construction products, we need to teach the [AI] language models to understand the Finnish language and to understand construction context and construction questions and topics." Participants in the programme receive special laptops and answer simple questions like "is the text about granting a building permit?"

Dr. Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, positively reviewed the project. He stated: "What people tell me in the prison... is that given that the purpose is rehabilitation, this cannot expand too much and there's no prison population to do this. If Finns or Finnish companies or Finnish AI developers need lots of data in Finnish, they have to look elsewhere than the prisons…The purpose of this in the prison is rehabilitation. The purpose is not to create lots of data for Finnish companies."

Prisoners are compensated for their work, though less than what individuals in comparable positions on the outside would earn. One of the participants in the AI annotation programme in a Finnish prison, under the pseudonym Robin, wrote to Euronews that they chose the work "to spend time for meaningful activities. Artificial Intelligence was a new topic for me, and it aroused my interest. Also to get money." Finnish authorities emphasized the uniqueness of the "Smart Prison" project. Other Nordic and European countries are interested in consulting on the digital project.