SecondChance

Breaking Chains, Building Futures.

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Inspiration

Ex-Convicts are one of the most vulnerable part of our society. The Bureau of Justice Statistics claims that approximately 60% of formerly incarcerated individuals in America struggle with unemployment (Wang & Bertram, 2022), this unemployment problem leads into another problem which is lack of stable income and difficult access to essential living needs for these people. Eventually this problem will create a vicious cycle where ex-convicts do their crime again in the reason of fulfilling their needs, as it is proven that within three years of their release, two-thirds of former inmates are rearrested, with more than 50% reincarcerated (Benecchi, 2021).

What it does

SecondChance comes to answer this prolonging problem with 2 main aims:

  1. To help ex-convicts regain their trust in society so that they will be more accepted and can get a better treatment from their surroundings.
  2. To provide them more opportunity to find a stable income of living through job providing system

SecondChance implements an innovative way to achieve these goals by implementing Gamification concept to our idea, using daily tasks like:

  1. Journaling System Journaling system with smart AI verificatory that can ensure the validity of their journal. Journaling helps people to better reflect on themselves so they can learn from their mistakes and be a better person. It is important to make sure that the user really reflects on themselves and not just uttering random words in the journal
  2. Community Events Providing community events for these people so they can help others and do social activities to regain the trust from society. These activities are such as blood donor, beach cleaning, etc
  3. Skill Training Provide them with job-ready skills whether is it for laying a job or building their own business. We aim to get the user to be job-ready so they can have a good source of income and be financially stable.

From doing tasks they will get points in which after they reach a certain milestone they can be connected to a job provider that suits their skills or a professional guide to develop their business. More points mean the higher probability to be recruited, this reward system will motivate them to try to be a better person each day.

Additionally, we develop a smart Chat-bot to help the user to be a better person and as a personal consultant for their daily lives.

How we built it

The system is built on web application using Bootstrap as its FrontEnd framework, Node.js and ExpressJS as its BackEnd framework. NLP system that was trained using a pre-trained BERT model was used to verify the validity of the daily journaling input of the user, ensuring that the entry is a valid self-reflection rather than just unrelated blabbering. Chatbot is developed using Gemini's API with pre-inputted prompt to suit our application needs. All of these services are combined in microservices architecture using Docker.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Shortly before the deadline we run into a deployment problem in which the hosting service provider (Azure and ECS) somehow randomly throws error 403 to the request which makes the website sometimes accessible and sometimes is not accessible. We develop a temporary solution for the problem by hosting it in our own device while still on judging period.
  2. The integration of the API's in microservices architecture requires a lot of time for development and debugging to solve bugs in the application
  3. Managing our stamina and focus during 36 hour long coding marathon is an entirely new and challenging experience for all of us :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite all the challenges, we're proud to be able to solve most of the problems happening in the development process. We're proud to be able to deliver an innovative product that can deliver great impact especially for ex-convicts. We hope to see a better future and a second chance for these people. We're also proud of ourselves to endure our first hackathon and deliver a considerably good performance for us.

What we learned

We learned a lot from these experience, ranging from technical skills such as building and deploying an AI service, managing dependencies, and connecting APIs to soft-skills like time and stress management and teamwork. We also learn that hackathons is not just about technical skills but also about how you manage your energy and stress level to deliver the best performance.

What's next for SecondChance

SecondChance plans to leverage its service by bugfixing and resolving hosting issues that is stated above. Additionally providing more robust gamification system verification and coordinating with third-parties to provide better services. We also hope for governmental support for our program to help this country to become a better place for all people

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