Prison isn’t set up for today’s tech so we have to do legal work the old way

https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2025/08/19/prisons-outdated-technology-hurts-our-chances-at-freedom/

by danso • 11 months ago

119 94 11 months ago

prisonjournalismproject.org

aspenmayer6• 11 months ago

Prison is like a SCIF you can never leave.

mikeodds• 11 months ago

Equally awkward places to have your phone not on silent

aspenmayer6• 11 months ago

Could’a swear I turn the ringer off

Was wrong, first burner nick(ed)

Had’a ‘nother one; unsure on vibrate tho

So now my cellie’s shitting bricks

red-iron-pine2• 11 months ago

just as many doors to get buzzed in through

slightly less cavity searches

buckle80173• 11 months ago

Sounds like your lawyer messed up not sending paper copies.

Good thing he saved the $10.

bdangubic• 11 months ago

Paper copies?????! What is this, 1999 :-) Many (many, many…) Courts have been fully paperless for years

buckle80173• 11 months ago

ok but the jail is not and he would have gotten the paper copies right away

umanwizard• 11 months ago

Sure, but what stops the lawyer from printing out the PDFs?

Havoc• 11 months ago

Why can’t they just change the rules?

At some point surely everyone involved can see it’s just silly

buckle80173• 11 months ago

because they don't trust inmates with computers and they also don't trust their lawyers

decimalenough• 11 months ago

Why would they?

Put yourself in a prison bureaucrat's shoes. There is no upside to changing the rules, easier legal work or whatever for the inmates doesn't affect them (hell, it might even cause more work). But if they do change the rules and something bad happens (like, shock horror, somebody smuggling in a picture of a naked lady), it's their ass on the line for approving it.

moron4hire2• 11 months ago

The downside for them is more like: prisoners get released earlier, so they don't make their quarterly earnings targets, so that's why their asses are on the line.

BrenBarn• 11 months ago

One answer to that is that prison bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of deciding stuff like this.

cmeacham984• 11 months ago

Most people don't actually believe in rehabilitative justice (they'll say they do, but ask them how they think a rapist should be treated).

Thus, fixing this is not a priority to them, if anything they want it to stay this way.

rectang3• 11 months ago

Rape is not the only crime people get sent to jail for, and at least some fraction of the US population is capable of seeing the imprisoned as human beings.

I agree nevertheless that inflicting maximum misery and pain on prisoners is popular with a substantial segment of the US electorate, and thus there are negative incentives discouraging even simple fixes like the technology changes wished for in this article.

AngryData• 11 months ago

Sure they could, but who with that capability has a reason to care? To the jail a bad court result from inmates means nothing to them and might even help them maintain prison capacity and politicians don't care because most of the people will never be allowed to vote again.

Finnucane• 11 months ago

because our prison system is designed to inflict as much punishment and cruelty as the courts will let them get away with. Nothing will be changed unless it is forced by law.

bsenftner• 11 months ago

The courts were weaponized well over a decade ago, by the political party system. It's now a drawn out media fight where no matter what the public loses.

N_Lens2• 11 months ago

Total global debt is estimated in excess of 100trillion. We have everything we need to thrive, but we're living within a self created system of indenture for most people.

Why don't we just change the rules?

Terr_• 11 months ago

Total global debt is estimated in excess of 100trillion.

That number sounds scary, but ask yourself: Who is the debt owed to? Is it to Galactus, Eater of Worlds, who will devour our planet if we fail to pay? No, the debt is mostly owed to other people who have their own debts. Follow the flows around--instead of summing every step--and you'll see the cycles cancel out.

Imagine three people marooned on an island: They could find a shiny rock, slap a price on it, and sit down in a circle, lending it around clockwise until the Total Islandwide Debt reaches $300 trillion, where each resident has $100t in debt (to the person on their right) and $100t in credit (to the person on their left.)

Have these three castaways doomed civilization or enslaved the masses? Will countries deliberately not-rescue them to prevent an economic crisis? Nah.

TLDR: "Total" debt is not a very meaningful statistic.

varenc• 11 months ago

Changing the rules is definitely more work than maintaining status quo. Imagine a giant bureaucracy and all the things that are would need to adjust. And granting prisoners even limited internet access is fraught.

A close friend of mine taught physics and programming in San Quentin and for the most part his students couldn't use even a restricted variant of the internet. He told me guards would complain that he was "making criminals smarter".

He ended up hosting a local copy of Wikipedia for student use, but to make the prison staff happy he had to remove any controversial articles from it, like "lockpicking" and any article with explicit imagery.

650REDHAIR• 11 months ago

Because changing the rules makes you look “soft on crime”.

There’s no incentive to fix the broken system(s).

zem• 11 months ago

it's doing what it's designed for, which is to funnel money okay the pockets of corrupt people, and abuse a (literally) captive population. the average american does not care because a lot of them are fine with cruelty towards those they consider inferior.

quietthrow• 11 months ago

Aren’t prisons a business run by corporations? And I could be wrong but I recall reading somewhere a while ago that 1 or 2 companies run most of the prisons in USA. As such they probably have no need / incentives driven by market forces to modernize. It’s not exactly a market to begin with in the first place I would say.

cmeacham984• 11 months ago

New Jersey State Prison is, as the name implies, a state-run prison.

ronsor• 11 months ago

Most people are not in private prisons (< 10% [0]), even if there shouldn't be any at all. Of course, there are still many "contractors" and "vendors" (phone service providers, food vendors, etc.) in public prisons which grift everyone.

[0] https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...

monkeyelite3• 11 months ago

Public is when the government holds the wallet and pays vendors. Private is when they give a wallet to someone else to pay the vendors.

jrm4• 11 months ago

The answer to this question is technically no but practically yes.

bdcravens2• 11 months ago

There are some private prisons, but overwhelmingly most are run by the state or federal government. However, that makes what you say even more true; they aren't driven by competitive market forces. Of course, many things aren't, and presumably that's the role of government regulations, to protect the public interests and fulfill the social contract. (Whether it does or doesn't is larger topic, and not something I'm trying to address in this comment)

alchemyzach• 11 months ago

If prison is going to claim to be rehabilitative then access to word processors, and even some websites (jstor, wikipedia, etc), is a bare minimum requirement imo. Revoke it for bad behavior, sure, but it should otherwise be available several hours per day.

And to all the vindictive sociopath losers out there who want prisons to just inflict max pain all the time - do you not realize improving prison quality of life directly benefits you and could even save your life? Brutalizing a man with harsh conditions, treating him like a wild animal for months/years on end, and then releasing him is just going to make him 5x more angry and dangerous upon release and less likely to assimilate, but now here he comes walking down the same street as you and your loved ones

bongodongobob• 11 months ago

Oh this is easy.

Brutalizing a man with harsh conditions, treating him like a wild animal for months/years on end, and then releasing him is just going to make him 5x more angry and dangerous upon release and less likely to assimilate, but now here he comes walking down the same street as you and your loved ones

"Maybe he should have made better choices" they say, as they smugly reference an eye for an eye in their text sent from God.

programjames• 11 months ago

I think more realistically, they'll argue if the prison didn't succeed in rehabilitating them, they obviously just need a longer sentence.

virtue3• 11 months ago

Otherwise they just learn how to be better criminals from other inmates.

Life is really tough on the outside for a lot of prisoners. I’m extremely in favor of helping them lead successful and productive lives on the outside that don’t need to rely on crime.

mulmen2• 11 months ago

Revoke it for bad behavior, sure

Why is this an acceptable form of punishment?

unnamed76ri• 11 months ago

This reads like it was written by someone who is developing a Batman villain.

N_Lens2• 11 months ago

I would argue that a significant proportion of people are unable to act in their own immediate best interest - they actively make choices that create their misery, sometimes even knowingly punishing themselves.

How much less are they able to make positive choices for remote 'others', especially people they consider bad?

awesome_dude3• 11 months ago

Because wikipedia is editable by _anyone_ it's probably not the best for prisons - it would provide a means for communication that wasn't able to be monitored.

I mean, if you were in prison and had access to Wikipedia, I could edit, or put something on the talk page, that was a message to you.

You would look up the specific page, and get the message.

stickfigure• 11 months ago

There are downloadable, offline versions of wikipedia.

mulmen2• 11 months ago

This is an excellent point. Wikipedia is explicitly not a primary source so any access to it should include the sources as well.

giardini• 11 months ago

"...make him 5x more angry and dangerous..."??

Laughable: maybe it's the prison food. But perhaps to be cautious we should increase the gruel and reduce the use of red meat *a la'" Oliver Twist?

kjkjadksj• 11 months ago

It seems the rehabilitation strategy for a lot of offenders in prison is to merely take away their youth and hope that middle and senior age decline keeps them out of trouble. For some people this might work but the opportunity cost is absolutely enormous.

mayo369• 11 months ago

Wait a moment, they can't use computer? I remember read some news about prison people become a programmer or something like that...

ddtaylor• 11 months ago

Federal versus state(s).

The Federal system is more-or-less standardized and many have access to many things either on campus or remotely.

The State system is a hodge-podge of nonsense and most States are ran like trash for money reasons.

burnt-resistor2• 11 months ago

Expanding on this: each state is often run by a mix of public and for-profit institutions and services by crooked corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, and so there are often incentives like campaign $upport for politicians to find ways to imprison as many people as possible. In Texas, the facilities are like 19th century penal colonies.

astura• 11 months ago

So each prison or prison system has its own rules.

But I can imagine a prison allowing people to learn computer skills while also having very limited access to computers. They could have a computer lab that has locked down computers and no Internet access and is accessed with supervision for use only for classes and class assignments.

pm902• 11 months ago

Everyone should want prisons to be better; it isn’t that hard to imagine of some unfortunate circumstances that can lead to you or someone you know ending up there; its in everyone’s best interest to keep it effective, efficient and as painless as possible to make it through the system.

rossant2• 11 months ago

Yes, and it's a fallacy to imagine you'll never end up there if you don't ever do anything wrong. The proportion of totally innocent people in prison is all but negligible. Hard to believe but true.

pfannkuchen3• 11 months ago

While true that some people do end up in that situation, I think the probability of the average hner ending up in that situation is basically zero. The people who are overrepresented in being harassed by police tend to be underrepresented in technology circles.

ACCount37• 11 months ago

Sure feels like the prison system is in a dire need of better incentives.

Prisons should have strong incentives to reduce recidivism. I.e. 50% of the payment private prisons get per person being held back under a "no reoffense" clause. Which would encourage prisons to treat their inmates better, among other things.

LatteLazy• 11 months ago

This is true in an ideal world where we have unlimited resources and all other services are already fully funded. But that is not the world we live in.

How many laptops will you remove from schools to provide to prisons? How many people should lose Medicare coverage to pay to have someone manually check the gbs of material a flash drive sent to or from a prisoner contains?

And all this because lawyers don’t want to just hit print?

sharts• 11 months ago

Not just prison but the mental health system. Heck even the health system.

A large proportion of people in prison are there because of mental issues and there was nowhere else to put them since nobody can navigate that mess and there is little to no funding for it.

Particularly since (public) mental health institutionalization was deemed to infringe on “freedom” (and also not profitable) the only options today are prison or running around the streets until inevitably they do something that warrants imprisonment.

There are some things that markets can invigorate through innovation. But public health and safety certainly isn’t one of those things.

burnt-resistor2• 11 months ago

It's no accident. Maximum cruelty, difficulty, and petty punitiveness are the point because America happily throws away people and doesn't have any concept of reform or reintegration.

kelseydh• 11 months ago

I never understood why prisoners shouldn't at least have read-only access to the internet.

This is going to become a bigger issue as more and more people think and understand the world through Google searches and LLMs. One reason people who post bail end up with vastly better outcomes in court is because they can prepare for their cases so much better than those stuck in jail waiting for trial.

xboxnolifes• 11 months ago

How does one setup a read-only access to the internet?

pcthrowaway• 11 months ago

One doesn't "setup a read-only access to the internet". But for information access, I imagine something like Kiwix[1] or El Paquete Seminal (without the piracy of course)[2] would be useful to a lot of people

Another option would be to mitm all web requests from a custom web-browser (install a root cert on all devices) and drop all POST, PUT, and DELETE requests. Prohibit the browser from storing cookies or localStorage, and perhaps maintain an allow-list of sites which can be accessed.

This is obviously not foolproof, but it'd certainly make real-world "request smuggling" much more difficult.

Of course, a better question is if there's really even value to providing read-only internet access in the first place? I understand that for some inmates there might be concerns of them contributing to illicit operations in the outside world, but the rationale I usually hear for why inmates are prevented from computer/internet access has more to do with the "dangerous" information they might access (how to commit crimes in the future, avoid getting caught, etc). And I think both of these arguments are worth our skepticism.

[1] https://kiwix.org/en/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

moi2388• 11 months ago

Because their friends on the outside can give them information or instructions.

Killings of rival gangs in prisons for rewards etc

arcfour• 11 months ago

This happens anyways, though. And I have to imagine it is already fairly easy to tell someone in prison to do something of this nature, it's not a ton of information to convey, exactly.

disishtupid• 11 months ago

Upgrading systems now a days always means adding more access from more people.

Prison isn’t set up for today’s tech so we have to do legal work the old way

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