Prisoners in Finland being employed to label data to build accurate AI

With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the fear of being left behind in a fast-evolving world looms over everyone, but what about those who are already cut off from society, such as prisoners?

Finland, long heralded as a pioneer in humane prison practices, is trying to bridge this gap.

Over the past two years, some Finnish prisons have introduced AI-related tasks to inmates, moving beyond traditional prison labour in an effort to prepare them for a future where digital literacy is crucial.

This initiative, in collaboration with a start-up, aims to reduce reoffending by equipping inmates with modern skills.

Metroc is a Finnish market data company that aggregates public construction data and delivers categorised data to its clients.

The company approached the Finnish Prison and Probation Service with the idea of using prison labour for data annotation – a process that involves classifying and labelling information to improve AI accuracy.

AI systems need human input when they’re being developed, especially when dealing with languages like Finnish, which is spoken by only five million people globally.

This creates challenges in a high-wage economy like Finland, where hiring native speakers can be costly.

“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,” Jussi Virnala, founder of Metroc, told Euronews Next. 

“I was a summer trainee 10 years ago at the Ministry of Justice, and I happened to know the organisation. So then I just called the contact to the criminal sanctions agency and started to have discussions about this type of idea and they were immediately really excited about it,” Virnala added.

The company prepares training materials which include a basic course about construction history and terminology as well as AI.

Participants are provided with special laptops and are asked simple questions such as “is the text about granting a building permit?”

An inmate participating in the AI annotation work at a Finnish prison, nicknamed *Robin, wrote to Euronews Next 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”.

The ‘normality principle,’ a Nordic approach to prisons

This AI work reflects the broader ethos of the Nordic prison system, which emphasises maintaining conditions that resemble life outside as closely as possible. The “normality principle,” a core philosophy of Nordic incarceration, seeks to avoid stripping away an inmate’s sense of autonomy. 

“The so-called normality principle is important. We try to keep the prison conditions as normal as possible compared to normal society and other citizens and the rights that any citizen can have regardless of whether he’s in prison or not,” Pia Puolakka, project manager of “Smart Prison” at the Finnish Prison and Probation Service, told Euronews Next.

“So prisoners can, in a restricted way, use the services of the outside society, also digitally, while they are incarcerated. But of course, we have also very precise security policy. And everything we do digitally is secured and we follow the data protection and data security instructions,” Puolakka added.

Finnish law allows prisoners to make Internet video calls and use email while incarcerated in closed prisons.

In 2018, the prison authorities started a project called “Smart Prison” to comply with the legislation and use digital services to increase prisoners’ rehabilitation, education, and contact with their relatives, social services, and health care services.

By familiarising inmates with digital skills, the Smart Prison programme aims to narrow the digital divide that many face upon release, ultimately easing their transition back into society.

The projects run across three prisons in Finland where every prisoner is offered a personal cell device. A special software for internal prison communication and management enables them to contact staff and manage daily schedules inside the prison digitally.

Some other prisons have joint-use workstations where prisoners can use digital services, but they also have more traditional forms of work. 

“This data work with computers is future-oriented, forward-looking,” said Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a researcher at the University of Helsinki who is monitoring the project.

“There’s lots of computers, and digital devices [outside of the prison], and this needs to be reflected then in the prison as well. So what the data work can do in the prison, it sort of puts the prisoner in front of a computer, it introduces the computer into the prison,” Lehtiniemi said.

Navigating ethical boundaries

This blend of AI, prison labour, and corporate needs is not without its complexities. 

While data annotation is crucial for building AI systems, tasks are often repetitive and mundane, with one inmate telling Euronews Next the work is “boring”.

“I am a lively and energetic person. I like physical work more. This work is to pass the time and to get money,” prisoner Robin wrote in Finnish, which was translated and forwarded via Puolakka in an email.

But Robin acknowledges they “got to understand what AI is and got some rhythm in my everyday life” thanks to the programme.

AI labelling work has raised ethical concerns globally, especially after companies like OpenAI and Google were criticised for outsourcing data labelling to low-paid workers.

Dr Oğuz Alyanak, a cultural anthropologist at the Fairwork project of the Oxford Internet Institute whose research focuses on labour migration, said AI annotation and labelling work is often low-paid, short-lived, heavily monitored, and has health risks.

“It is therefore important for us at Fairwork to highlight these problems that workers raise regarding AI work, and approach the AI supply chain with a critical eye,” he said.

While he could not comment on the Finnish prison case in particular, he says that many companies “where data annotation or content moderation is done advertise such work as an opportunity to gain new skills which may come in handy in finding future employment”.

Most workers engage themselves in the “precarious” data work not to equip themselves with modern skills but to secure a few job opportunities in their countries, according to Alyanak.

The Finnish authorities say that prisoners are fairly compensated. Robin wrote that at first, they received €3 euros per day and then after it raised to €4.62 per day.

“The compensation is exactly the same as for those prisoners doing any other type of prison work. So it’s fair, and we have to remember that comparing the open labour market to what prisoners are doing in prison is not the same situation. Prisoners don’t have to pay for their living or food or basic maintenance or things like this during incarceration,” Puolakka told Euronews Next.

Lehtiniemi says the prison is a strictly regulated environment which he believes can help “excessive or exploitative things that you could imagine happening with the project”.

“It’s not the Wild West that tech companies can just start exploiting,” he added.

“People assume that something fishy must be going on, right? There’s a prison and there’s AI, and there’s tech companies and what we know about data work, in general, we know that usually, it’s low-paid work”.

However, Alyanak says that transparency is crucial as a strictly regulated environment can also mean that work-related problems are not easily brought to public view.

Researchers and prison officials also caution that the focus should remain on offering inmates a chance to develop new skills, rather than on creating a vast data workforce for companies.

“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,” Lehtiniemi said.

He stresses Finland’s incarceration rate is significantly lower than the EU average of around 100 per 100,000 with approximately 3,000 prisoners in closed prisons – about 50 per 100,000 inhabitants. In the United States, the rate is even higher, ranging from 500 to 700 per 100,000.

Metroc also admits that it cannot rely completely on the prison labour and says its staff including the founder Virnala do the annotation tasks themselves.

“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,” Lehtiniemi said.

Prison officials acknowledge that not every inmate finds the work suitable, and it is by no means a universal solution. However, for those willing to try, it offers a unique opportunity to engage with evolving technology. 

“My experience is that most of the prisoners who have had the opportunity to try the [AI] work, they have wanted to continue. They liked it. But, of course, every work is not for everybody,” Satu Rahkila, senior specialist at the Prison and Probation Service of Finland who coordinates the programme with Metroc, told Euronews Next.

“But we want to motivate the prisoners to try it… we have good experiences because many prisoners have bad experiences at work or school or they have difficulties and they can have also some limits,” Rahkila said, adding that they can be afraid initially and then find it’s not complicated.

Finland’s experiment with AI in prisons has drawn the attention of other countries interested in integrating technology into correctional facilities.

The Nordics and other European countries have sought consultation on the AI work and Smart Prison projects, according to the Finnish authorities.

For more on this story, watch the video in the media player above.

* Euronews Next requested an interview with an inmate currently participating in the AI work. The Prison and Probation Service of Finland forwarded Euronews Next’s interview questions to an inmate who chose to use the nickname “Robin”. The authority translated and forwarded Robin’s answers to Euronews Next via email. Euronews was asked not to reveal Robin’s gender.