Social and collaborative robots in prison

Social and collaborative robots are rarely found in prisons, a finding that applies worldwide with a few exceptions. Yet they could help with numerous tasks. How such robots can and should be used in prisons is explored in this article. It examines the situation in Switzerland and includes expert interviews with the Inter-cantonal Commissioner for Digitalization and several prison directors and their staff as well as inmates. It becomes clear that there are certainly areas in which social and collaborative robots would be useful and beneficial or even preferable to humans. However, there are also arguments and reservations against their use. The results can be transferred to other states under the rule of law with all due caution. It would be important to conduct further research in other countries and cultures.

Keywords

Subject (DDC)

330 - Wirtschaft
300 - Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie, Anthropologie

Project

Event

International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR)

Exhibition start date

Exhibition end date

Conference start date

Conference end date

Date of the last check

ISBN

978-981-96-3521-4
978-981-96-3522-1

ISSN

Language

English

Created during FHNW affiliation

Yes

Strategic action fields FHNW

Publication status

Published

Review

Peer review of the complete publication

Open access category

Closed

License

Citation

Siegmann, T., & Bendel, O. (2025). Social and collaborative robots in prison. In O. Palinko, L. Bodenhagen, J.-J. Cabibihan, K. Fischer, S. Šabanović, K. Winkle, L. Behera, S. Sam Ge, D. Chrysostomou, W. Jiang, & H. He (Eds.), Social Robotics. 16th International Conference, ICSR + AI 2024, Odense, Denmark, October 23–26, 2024, Proceedings (Vol. 1, pp. 432–445). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-3522-1_37

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