Life, Without Possibility Of Email (Or Any Internet Content)

Miscellaneous

from the odd-rules dept

In Connecticut, officials are saying they’re going to start monitoring prisoner correspondences with “prison pen pal” sites. This is in response to the somewhat horrifying revelation that a man serving a sentence for killing a young girl he met over the internet, was online seeking women pen pals from prison. While it’s a bit shocking that Connecticut prisons weren’t already monitoring such content, some states have gone to the complete opposite extreme. Salon has an article saying that the California prison system forbids all internet-based content from entering the prison. That means you can’t even print out an email or a webpage and send it into the prison via snail mail. To most people, this doesn’t make any sense. One prisoner is suing about it. California prison officials say that it’s to prevent prison workers from being overworked dealing with all the internet printouts flowing into jails. They also bring up the obvious panic-button response: security. However, these excuses don’t ring true. There’s nothing “secret” that could be presented on a website that couldn’t be written out by hand. Also, there are plenty of other ways to limit the amount of incoming snail mail. Some believe the real reason is to prevent a situation like the one in Connecticut. Prison officials don’t want their inmates to even have remote access to prison pen pal sites, which are, apparently, growing in popularity.