UNLCK

Problem

During a single year, an estimated 2.1 million youth under the age of 18 are arrested in the United States. US is the #1 jailer of incarcerated youth.  Juvenile prisons are places where control and punishment are the priority, not rehabilitation.  The School-to-Prison-Pipeline is a major contributor to the Prison Industrial Complex where America is home to 4% of the world's population, yet 25% of the world's prison population.  Few of these facilities that house our young provide either quality education services or mental health care or other services adolescence need to heal.  Many will return back to society without the necessary skills and mentality to overcome the challenges of re-entry. 

UNLCK aims to solve this problem by reaching the justice impacted individuals where they're at and help to transform their mindset.  The key that locks a door is the same key that unlocks it.  The key to unlocking the potential in our youth is to meet them where they're at, speak their language and help them to see and begin the process of realizing their innate gifts.  

Purpose begins with the individual.  The community must take upon itself the responsibility of nurturing and protecting the individual, because the invidividual, knowing her or his purpose, will then invest energy in sustaining the community.  There is a certain reciprocity here at work.

UNLCK's proposed solution is to implement a program within juvenile institutions that is focused on the development of game design skills.  This program will introduce youth offenders to game design and technology and seek to nurture and awaken their creative gifts.

The positive impacts that would result from broad adoption of UNLCK's solution would be to create a stronger civil society and increasespublic safety through justice impacted individuals learning how to improve their strategic decision-making abilities, increase entrepreneurial energy and critical thinking skills, steering them away from repeating the same mistakes and lowering recidivism.  Thereby, decreasing unnecessary and adverse law enforcement encounters.

I chose prototype stage because I, myself, am a justice impacted individual who has built and tested a product of my own design.  I taught myself game design while serving prison time and used what I learned to create a board game called PLUG WARS.

PLUG WARS was a recipient of Indie Game Developers Network (IGDN) 2020 Diversity Award and was featured in The Washington Post and in an ABC 7 News segment. 

Recently, I was given the opportunity to speak before students at NYU attending a Diversity & Tech class whose assignment was to write research papers about the game design of Plug Wars.

Game design not only taught me about studying human behavior but studying my own behavior which gave me the proper tools I needed to change for the better and live a more purposeful life.