Many prisoners get daily e-mail access. For outsiders there's either a web portal or an app. With the app you get a push notification when there's a new message. It's almost like texting, except it takes a few hours for any message to go through. Roundtrip can be a few more hours since e-mail access from the inside isn't continuous.
Glad this person had a computer program in their prison. I think most prisons have basically no real computer access except for a horrible "email" service called corrlinks. Very embarrassing for the US.
there are only handful of prisons where prisoners do not have access to the internet and if you are in one of those losing your email account will be the least of your worries :)
One of the details that I'm not seeing in the article is does this apply to State prison, Federal prison, or both? Based on my experience in Federal prison I expect that it's more targeted at State prison since I often talked to other inmates that were vocal about the atrocious rates they experienced while in those systems.
In Federal prison the phone and e-mail system is still pretty bad, but not as bad. We often joked that it was like going into a time machine nearly 25 years in the past where "phone minutes" were still a thing and they even invented the idea of "email minutes".
On the note of "email minutes" they actually charge you for the entire time you are in the system which includes wrestling with their UI/UX which has obviously been "fine tuned" to be as abusive as possible to drain your email minutes. They also remove basic features like copy/paste and in general most of the basic typing features you take for granted every day like holding CTRL or SHIFT to navigate between words or type over existing words. This is again another cheap tactic to ensure that generating text output is as slow as possible. There are similar tricks that are used to slow the progress of reading messages. (FWIW printing messages is somewhat possible and costs about $0.70 per message since you can't combine them into multiple on the same page and the font size during printing is large)
Entertainingly this creates a class of inmates that are highly adept at navigating this stupid system and can churn out messages faster than anyone else combined with decent typing skills and knowledge of all the failures of the system. It's not a bad "hustle" as it's actually pretty impactful to help people send messages to their loved ones.
Fun story! While I was doing my time I setup a script that uses puppeteer to scrape the front page of HN itself and tried to get the most interesting stories per week. It would then generate a PDF and email it to my friends who would print it out and send it to me, so I actually had a weekly digest of HN in my inmate mail. Originally I didn't know how absurd the rules would be about keywords and such (spoiler, they're not very strict and mostly only concerned with overt things) so I had a mapping of words that would get modified like the word "Hacker" became "Wacker" and "Auth[entication]" became "Lock" as a way to avoid spooky headlines like "Hacker Steals Authentication Codes" would become "Wacker Steals Lockentication Codes" - it was crude and ended up not being neccessary so a friend of mine modified the script to remove it upon request. I had originally wanted to hook the whole thing up to a printing API to automate the process (the entire thing was thrown together a week before I had to surrender) but the various printing APIs weren't really capable of handling the rules for inmate mail about page limits, colors, labeling, etc.
From my friend who was in: they get some daily time, and all their email is monitored. I could send him mail, but it was through the prison's website, not a regular email.
I imagine the web surfing they can do is fairly limited, but I didn't ask.
I also found out that you can buy anything in prison, including a cell phone, or drugs. Ratting out the people who actually sell the stuff is a great way to get yourself killed.
This is now interesting. Apparently prisoners in the US and many other countries are not allowed to have Internet access. In the US there is a system in place that allows inmates to communicate text only emails. I don't think you can call that plain text messaging "the Internet" in 2017.
With this supreme court ruling, how prisons in the US are going to allow inmates to have access to the real Internet? I mean you can not ban those inmates from accessing the Internet, right?
The biggest problem might be the lack of a "prisoner system in the US." The US has a Federal prisons system and 50 different state prison systems. Each system makes their own rules.
Federal prisoners may have access to send and receive email, through a system called CorrLinks. I think it is standard across all BOP facilities. At the state level, JPay.com does provide a means to contact inmates via email. Inmates cannot send email.
There are several companies which provide a means for friends and families of inmates to go online and order items for inmates, at least on the state level. Access Securepak (https://www.accesscatalog.com/) may be the largest. You pick the state and only authorized items are listed, packages are restricted to X times per year, a certain weight or dollar amount, etc. I think Texas runs their own online commissary.
A lot of prisoners have no access to the outside world, including the internet. Many prisons lack even a basic library. Inmates working with The Last Mile (http://thelastmile.org/) tweet by passing their tweets written on paper to volunteers who actually enter them.
As Sharlin says, getting into the prisons. There are other companies, like CorrLinks and AccessCorrections. (I believe CorrLinks has all of the federal prison system, in addition to some states.) These systems can work both ways or one way. For example, federal prisoners can email back and forth via CorrLinks; while some systems, only allow incoming email, which is printed out and provided to the prisoner.
The situation may not be perfect today, but communication to/from prisons are heavily guarded to prevent these situations and others.
Inmates in most countries can make phone calls only to phone numbers which have been approved, usually only family. You can't make random phone calls. All phone calls are monitored and recorded to prevent abuse.
You can't call an inmate afaik, that would be a very low security facility, which I am not aware of.
Visitors are only by request and undergo security checks before, during and after visits. And yes, visitors are a huge security issue in prisons, but if you deny all visitors to prisoners, you're in Guantanamo, not a normal prison anymore. There are different levels of security in prisons.
Internet access is much harder to control. Encryption is, as you as a HN reader know, very easy to do on a computer, but hard using your voice. Hiding information on a computer is easy, but very hard on a voice phone.
There have been prisons in the world that allowed internet access to inmates and there are problems with that, much as with visitors or phone calls. It's a balancing act to weigh those problems to the benefits. You just have to go into the discussion with open eyes about the problems that internet access would bring. Imagine a pedophile convicted for sexually harassing children online, and giving him/her internet access in prison. What an outrage. Someone in a low sec jail for DUI could be given internet access, no problems. It happends, I've even seen a CEO run his company from within the jail. He was given supervised internet access to his companys financial system once a month, one guard watching pover his shoulder at all times. Not a very scalable solution though.
The answer depends on the state and/or prison in the US. Many prisons don't have computers. If they do have internet access, it is heavily limited and monitored.
They also operate the e-mail system that can be used to send e-mail to/from inmates (using a JPay tablet, of course). You have to purchase 'stamps'. For e-mails.[1]
"One stamp corresponds to one 6000 character message (about the length of one handwritten page), or one attachment."
"JPay’s correctional email service is faster than regular mail, with inmates usually receiving emails within 48 hours." (emphasis added)
Looking up the pricing for a random facility[2], it's $18 for 40 'stamps', each one of which is good for 1 small attachment or 'page' of text. This is fucking extortion.
https://www.corrlinks.com
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