Conrad Black to Jail: Time To Give Prisoners Internet Access
Media baron Conrad Black is headed to a low-security prison today, joining the 1% of the American workers who already live in jail. Portfolio has the details of what he'll find there.
Among the usual jail features: No Internet access. Prisoners are given access to a prison libary and manual typewriters--and that's it. It's time we changed this.
The NYT reported last week that 1 in 100 American adults is in prison. If the point of prison is to punish wrongdoing by restricting liberty, the system is doing a fine job. If the point of prison is to extend prisoner punishment and societal alienation beyond the term of the jail sentence--and ensure that prisoners are not "rehabilitated"--then the system is also doing a fine job. We should rethink the second part.
The Internet is now as essential to American education, employment, and productivity as literacy. If we want people to have any chance of building productive lives for themselves (and the rest of us) after they get out of jail, we simply must give them access to the Internet while they're in jail. While we're at it, we should offer them online training--and even jobs--in engineering, customer service, editing, researching, and a thousand other areas that can be done remotely via the Internet. In an economy that is desperately short on educated, net-savvy workers, we should consider allowing prisoners to do regular net-based contract work while they're in jail (with some costs deducted to pay for their incarceration).
Conrad Black will stay literate during his 6 years in the big house, but most of the 1% of our workforce that's in jail now won't. When they get out, moreove, they'll be even farther behind. Giving prisoners Internet access won't make prison a cushy existence (no worries there). But it will help our economy, our citizens, and, ultimately, our society.
I am not sure what the solution is but it does not at all seem obvious to me.
And good news is...physical molestation impossible (as opposed to with un-incarcerated MySpace users)
On the other hand it seems like something that might be worth a try. Perhaps the answer would be monitoring of the activity with filters for keywords and such. There really is no right to privacy in jail.
Perhaps things like basic tasks like those seen on Mechanical Turk could work in certain facilities and among certain prisoners. However, the level of funding that would be required to support such integration is not something I see any government official getting behind. How can we justify spending money on something like this when there's plenty of room for improvement in things like public schools and government.
In an economy that is desperately in need of net savvy workers, the Shawshank approach does nothing for the 99% of people that are not in prison...
I don't see cost as particularly significant. a few dozen PCs in a library, and an internet connection is an infinitesimally small number relative to correction department budgets. A Week of someone's overtime would probably cover the cost.
My statement was more about integration and ongoing costs. Security measures that need to be in place, training costs, staff training, support, etc.
Control costs might not be that bad considering the percentage of non-violent offenders in the system.
substituting "internet access" for "telephone" makes the suggestion seem cool and sophisticated, when it is not.
rehabilitation is not, and can not be, the same thing as socialization. by definition, prison means separation and isolation and disconnection. passive media and recreation make sense. interaction and integration with the world at large is exactly the opposite of what prison is supposed to be, an represent
There are certainly evil people in the world who need to be behind bars, but neither most inmates or our society are served by this system, which takes primarily confused, uneducated people and clarifies their values for them - turning them into sub-humans.
Since prisons are now a revenue stream for a number of outsourcing companies, the prospect of ending this mostly mindless incarceration is bleak, that's why any such improvement should be considered.
Remember, there are neighborhoods where kids grow up accepting that prison will be a part of their lives. It's astounding to me that what we choose to do with these kids, since we have them in hand - is to ensure that they will remain criminals for the rest of their lives.
BTW - I am not a bleeding heart. I believe in the death penalty, just not the legal system that perpetrates it.
http://www.torontolife.com/blog/spectator/2008/may/09/white-men-cheer-mark-steyn-bay-and-bloor/
This includes nuisance phone calls in the middle of the night, spurious reports to the police that anti-Black posters are child molesters, and so on.
Just imagine how much worse it would be if Black had unsupervised Internet access.
Crooks like him should be on a rock pile rather than trying to influence political processes in the USA, a country he professes to admire above all others on earth, but whose laws he wilfully broke and whose citizens he ripped off.
The fact that some of those citizens were RICH shows what a turkey and loser he is and how he should bre reading books rather than surfing the Internet.