Indiana's Inmates Could Soon Have Access To Tablets (abc57.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC57 News in South Bend, Indiana: Indiana is looking to help offenders who are behind bars. Soon, each inmate in the Hoosier state could have their own tablet. The Indiana Department of Correction says the tablet will help inmates stay connected with their families and improve their education. Offenders will be able to use the tablets to access any classwork, self-help materials or entertainment. Officials expect to use entertainment, like music or movies, to reward good behavior. The proposal was first filed in January. Apple iPad's or kindles won't be used. Instead, a company that makes tablets specifically for prisons or jails will be hired. One San Francisco based-company they may consider, Telmate, has a device that is used in more than 20 states, including some jails in Marshall County. INDOC is hoping a vendor will front the costs of the entertainment apps so taxpayers won't have to. INDOC also says it wants to avoid charging inmate fees because charging fees that they can't afford would defeat the purpose of the system. If the company selected pays, the vendor would be reimbursed and still earn a profit.

Comments

Re:Why not?

[stephanruby]

How about "occupying their time" with work such as making license plates, breaking big rocks into smaller rocks, digging holes, filling in holes, etc.?

Making license plates doesn't earn the prison near enough money. And before you tell me about INDOC not wanting to charge the inmate fees, you'd be right of course. INDOC doesn't want to charge the inmates. It wants to charge their families. This is exactly how they used to do it for phone calls.

They used to charge up to $14 per minute for collect phone calls until the FCC recently put a stop to it. Now, they're capped at no more than $1.75 for 15 minutes. Can you believe it? On a 15 min phone call, there is now a shortfall of $208.25

Prisons have come to depend on this extra income for their sludge funds. Now that the FCC took it away from them. They just need to start providing services on cheap devices that the FCC hasn't even thought to regulate for prison yet. This is the real story here.

Re:Why not?

[BarbaraHudson]

Prisons have conjugal visits. They also have all the sex you never wanted. And in the female prisons, a lot of unwanted sex with the guards. If it weren't for the prison rapes and coerced sex, there are plenty of people who would be better off in prison than on the streets or in a shelter (shelters also have lots of unwanted sex for women who don't want to sleep outside - it's so bad in some areas that women are actually safer outside a shelter than in).

Re:Why not?

[Kjella]

Hmmm - prison = food, clothing, shelter, in some cases a good gym membership and now your own tablet with internet and skype and probably easy access to porn. What's the deterrent to crime then?

The conditions in prison are rarely effective as a deterrent anyway, either people think they'll get away with it (typically theft, burglary, mugging, robbery, trafficking illegal goods, fraud, embezzlement and related crimes) or crimes of passion (rage, lust, envy mostly, often combined with being drunk or high - most violent crime, rape and murder) where they're not thinking rationally of consequences. While there are certainly repeat offenders there's also many first-time offenders that have no real concept of what doing time is like or small time criminals that confuse being off the streets for a few weeks on minimum security with being locked up for years.

And most criminals don't return or not return to prison because of how the conditions are on the inside. They return because they don't really see any alternatives to the life they have on the outside. No money, no job, no CV or work history, so it's back to stealing or peddling drugs on the street corner. Or they have impulse control or substance abuse issues that don't just disappear with time. And if prison is some horrible hellhole then you have these "nothing to lose", "never going back" people who will do anything to get away with it and fight the police until they die in a rain of bullets from a SWAT team. They need to see that there is another way, in prison and after prison. Not everyone will want to change, but you can't whip them into changing.

Getting proper apples-to-apples numbers on the effect of treating prisoners humanely is very difficult, but it generally varies from "it helps" to "it doesn't hurt", there's really very little to suggest it makes things worse. It's mostly a matter of whether it's money worth spending. Here in Norway we created what the international press called "the world's most humane maximum security prison" but mainly it's that it is built like a normal living quarters like a dorm room or hotel room. No escapes, very low tension even though it's murderers and rapists. Even gangs keep the peace inside the prison, it's like everybody is on time-out. And quite many find they like it better than the life they had.