A View of Tomorrow
The first time Danny Peters, 55, walked around Community Correction Center II, a halfway house in Philadelphia, he felt he’d been there before.
“It was like déjà vu,” he said.
Until then, he had only seen it in a virtual reality video while serving a mandatory life sentence at Graterford prison, a state correctional facility outside Philadelphia. At the time, he had been incarcerated since 1980, when he was just 17 years old.
In 2012, the Supreme Court decided that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. And in 2016, the court made the decision retroactive, making nearly 2,000 juvenile lifers eligible for resentencing and for parole.
Suddenly, corrections officials in many states had to figure out what to do with inmates they never expected to have a life beyond the prison walls. In Pennsylvania, prison officials turned to virtual reality. Soon after, Colorado followed suit, creating a
