Running a Website from Your Prison Cell

Eh-Wire writes "Although prisoners Internet access is highly restricted, this hasn't prevented many inmates from getting around the restrictions with the judicious use of phone and snail-mail privileges to network with friends, relatives, activists, and associates to provide content to their websites. Some use their websites to badger witnesses and prosecuters, while others plead their case or phish for pen-pals. Some have successfully challenged their convictions through their websites, which complicates efforts by authorities to silence them. Websites domiciled outside of the respective jurisdictions further complicate the issue. Yahoo News has additional commentary on this controversial subject."

Comments

Prisoners

[schnits0r]

Why shouldn't they be allowed ot have their websites maintained in some fasion? They should be allowed to vote as citizens of a free country, so why can't they let their freedom of speech ring on the Internet, given the assumption that this would not comprimise safety or order?

Re:Prisoners

[Anonymous Coward]

who would have guessed... You take away most the freedoms of a person and they rebel and try to make the job of their opressors as difficult as possible.

Re:Prisoners

[mthreat]

I have to post as a non-Anonymous Coward because I was in prison for several years and I think it would be cowardly to do otherwise.

You say these inmates could look up how to break the system, cheat the system, find out what is going on in other prisons, read about gangs, get information on other inmates using Google, etc.

I hate to break it to you, but they can do all this without using the Internet. How? Have people on the outside access the information (on the Internet or other places), print it out, and mail it in. And yes, I know, the geniuses in the prison mail room check incoming mail for "inappropriate" material. There are ways around this too. So then what, cut off their mail and contact with society?

Don't be so judgemental on people in prison. Bertrand Russell was in prison.

On the other hand, I think it was Winston Churchill who said if you want to see the scum of the earth, go to any prison and watch shift change.

Re:Prisoners

[number11]

How exactly would selling drugs to willing buyers (a felony in some circumstances) be ignoring the rights of others..
When one of those buyers is a mothers who then gives birth to a malformed crack-baby.
When one of those buyers gets so addicted to meth that his teeth fall out.
When one of those buyers looses the will to live and dies in a dim corner. alone, in desperation.

Oh. Like:
Selling alcohol to a mother who then gives birth to a fetal-alcohol syndrome baby.
Selling tobacco to someone who smokes indoors exposing others to the toxic fumes.
Selling Cheetos to a lardbutt who ends up needing a quadruple bypass.
Selling a cellphone to someone who talks while driving and kills a family in the process.
Selling weapons to a government that uses them to attack third-world countries and kill tens of thousands of people.
Selling a TV to somebody who doesn't get enough exercise.
Selling a Hummer to someone who pisses away our oil and pollutes our air with it.

I guess I understand.

YRO?

[TFGeditor]

Why wasn't this headed "Your Rights Online"?

Re:YRO?

[justforaday]

Seriously, the one time they could've used that category in a way that makes sense and they didn't...

Michael Ross

[trelanexiph]

I have more than a passing famaliarity with the Michael Ross case. I waited up during January with the Rev Kobutsu Malone of the Engaged Zen Foundation (www.engaged-zen.org) waiting for the State of Connecticut to assist Mr Ross in suicide. Perhaps the death penalty may benifit someone, but in the case of Michael Ross the only person benifitting from his death is Michael Ross. Execution does not deterrance make, every criminal when they commit a crime believe they will get away with it, the punishment is no deterrant, that is why we have a criminal corrections system not a criminal punishment system. How do we treat this system? Very few believe in active correction, and the private companies running the prisons profit from keeping people in jail. Due to the nature of the system Michael Ross has decided it is better to die than to continue in this system. Perhaps considering this system it would be better that Mr Ross stuck around for awhile to share it.

Re:What are we paying for?

[Qzukk]

Heh.

That someone modded you funny for this shows that people are rather ignorant of what goes on in this country.

I say lets bake the fuckers. Lets set up tents in the hot Arizona sun, lets put up tents, lets make the inmates wear pink uniforms, and lets feed them hotdogs made with green dye. Lets stick black gang members with white supremasists in the same tent.

When I see people propose stuff like this, I'm just so glad that we have DNA testing that works every time and we have District Attorneys in charge that are always quick to make sure justice is served.

At least our country still has a few good citizens that still care and want to keep our justice system honest.

When you suggest torturing inmates remember that in a year it could be you standing there in those tents. It may be "good enough for our troops in Iraq", but every single person there made the choice to join the army.

Can you say the same for our justice system?

Prison = Crime University

[Corpus_Callosum]

Modern correctional intutitions are quite possibly the most culturally destructive institutions on the planet.

Consider for a moment what a prison system does:

Brings criminals together

Forces criminals to learn discipline, but particularly respect for more powerful criminals. By the time most inmates get out of prison, they will be affiliated with one or more criminal organizations mostly due to the fact that such affiliations are more or less required in prison to guarantee survival.

What do you think the ciminals talk about in a prison? How to evade the law, get out of trouble, do bigger jobs and scams, etc.. etc.. These topics are raised to an artform in such an environment

by virtue of the fact that so many criminals have been brought together, the best methods for breaking and evading the law for profit are naturally present in the minds of those that share a single location. Over time, the best methods are distilled into the common knowledge-pool inside the walls of the institution. In effect, this makes a prison much like a University, where the best ideas naturally distill out of the population of students and researchers. Only, in this case, we are dealing with socially destructive concepts.
So consider what we are doing when we put a convict into a prison:

We are paying tax dollars to educate the convict on sophisticated, state-of-the-art means to evade and break the law

We are hardening the criminal, training him and toughening him up

We are putting the criminal in a place where he can be recruited by crime syndicates and organizations
A prison is a quite ridiculous way to punish, because it punishes the system exponentially more than it punishes the criminal.

Modern prison systems are directly responsible for the nature and degree of organized crime and as an indirect result, corruption in the modern world (because the power that organize crime wields is generally directed towards the foundations of the system).

Now you want to give them websites? Hmph!

Seriously, though, the system needs to change. Putting criminals together is the worst possible thing for society. It would be much, much better to keep them in strict isolation or have some means of making sure that the influences around them are positive rather than negative.

Re:Prison = Crime University

[Corpus_Callosum]

I think the real solutions are to deal with societal issues that leads to so many people being in jail. Nip the problem in the bud so to speak. If you don't have inmates you don't have a problem dealing with inmates.

My real point here is that almost *anything* would be better for society than locking these people up together where they can learn from each other, become hardened, recruited by criminal organizations and *connected* - released back to the innocent world as predators working on their predatory doctoral dissertations.

A guy steals a car and runs from the police. When caught, he fights and because of all of this he goes to prison. When he comes out he is now part of a crime syndicate, knows everything there is to know about not getting caught, where to fence goods, who to call in case of problems, who the corrupt lawyers are that can make problems go away, etc.. etc.. etc.. He spends the rest of his life sucking blood from society.

Are we better off for having put him in prison? Perhaps a better conviction would be loosing his driving priveleges for the rest of his life. At least that way, we haven't created a more dangerous type of criminal.

That is the point. We react to crimes by training the criminal to be a more dangerous type of criminal. Isn't that madness?

Re:you suck

[chachob]

If you do it because you feel like you're doing anyone a service, you must be new here.

Psst...his UID is 73503. Yours is 555410.

Re:Interesting? Try troll bullshit.

[HiThere]

That wouldn't qualify US prisons as the worst in the world. It does sound like exaggeration, though. But he didn't mention what state, so I can't say he's wrong. There are a lot of strange laws on the books, and I know for (fairly) certain that if you don't have enough money to defend yourself, you can get railroaded on next to no evidence. And if you do have money, they'll never pay you back for the damages that they did in prosecuting you.

I know of two cases that are nearly as bad. In one case the guy ended up dead shortly after he went to prison (no funds). In the other the guy's career was destroyed, his possessions and funds were seized (so that he couldn't afford a lawyer) and his parents house ended up on the block to pay for his lawyer. It's still being prosecuted. (Or it was a year ago. The prosecution tactic has been to postpone hearing at the last minute, trying to run the defense out of money without ever letting the case come to trial. JUSTICE! HAH!)

The US *IS* a police state. It's operating under disguise, but don't be fooled. I can say this because they don't care. If they did...

1) They don't need evidence to bankrupt you. All it takes is an accusation, and they can steal all your property and all your money. They commonly do this to prevent you from hiring a lawyer. (It's called RICO. What it's called and how they use it are two different things.)

2) If you don't have enough money to defend yourself, you can't defend yourself. The public defenders are essentially a joke. They need the cooperation of the police, so they don't do anything that might offend them, unless a news reporter is watching and interested.

We still have the shell of a democracy, and many of the outer forms. And that's *IT*. Perhaps some of the other states are better off, but a lot of this corruption stems from the top. And has for several decades.