Prisoners in Finland participate in AI training programme

For the past two years prisoners in Finland have been participating in AI annotation tasks, such as labelling and classifying data, as part of a rehabilitation programme.

Instead of traditional prison tasks like sewing, cleaning, and doing laundry, inmates at three closed prisons in Finland have been offered the opportunity to try out this type of digital work.

The initiative, which is partnered with market data startup, Metroc, aims to reduce recidivism by equipping inmates with modern skills.

“As our software tries to interpret text material and different details about construction products, we need to teach the [AI] language models to understand Finnish language and to understand construction context and construction questions and topics,” says Jussi Virnala, Founder of Metroc.

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.

Metroc 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 earn money”.

Researchers monitoring the project say that the strict regulations in Finnish prisons ensure safer working conditions than similar jobs outside the system.

“It’s good to give the prisoners something to do, to have a structure in the day, to help them so they adjust to the eventual release back to civilian life, so that you would have slightly more likelihood of not committing more crimes when you are released in civilian life and data work in general is seen as really helpful in this,” says Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a researcher at the University of Helsinki.

The Finnish authorities say the AI work and Smart Prison projects are unique and other Nordic and European countries have sought consultation on prison digitalisation projects.