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You have to give wardens/politicians money to put any kind of technology in their prisons, so free video chat/messaging isn't going to happen unless some benevo
by hackermailman 6y ago
You have to give wardens/politicians money to put any kind of technology in their prisons, so free video chat/messaging isn't going to happen unless some benevolent billionaire prince is funding you.
However you could do some kind of distance education via letters, remember math can be learned with just pen and paper and not the kind of shit we learn in highschool but the Terrence Tao Analysis from scratch kind. There's an old book called the Schemer's Guide by Iain Ferguson (spelling?) which is programming with pen and paper. Many opportunities here besides just communications, just an idea, I have no clue how it would work in practice.
Another idea is create social media or pen pal profiles for prisoners where they fill out a template and you just launch it for them, so they can find other people to talk to, many people inside have nobody on the outside, this is why facebook groups like Jail Mail exists and the like. Of course legal problems here, if some maniac uses your service who should be in jail.
Wikipedia search is also something I've always thought should exist via snail mail. 'What is <subject>' should return the entire wikipedia page or other encyclopedia page for convicts.
A marketplace for anonymous convicts would also be interesting that nobody has done, many of these guys/girls are experts in fitness since there's nothing else to do inside, they should be able to make some kind of money (again, depending on societal heinousness of crime) by being a motivational coach or something. I have plenty of other ideas, many of them require money/political connections which I don't have but just things I observed while in lockup wondering why are these petty criminals just rotting away in here when there's so much opportunity not just for them, but people they can personally effect to make amends for whatever they have done. I even met a few hundred song writers inside that wanted to be 'producers' and sell their rhythms or lyrics with no way to do this. Anyway good luck
- HideousKojima 6y ago>You have to give wardens/politicians money to put any kind of technology in their prisons, so free video chat/messaging isn't going to happen unless some benevolent billionaire prince is funding you. Having done a decent amount of IT work at prisons, this isn't really the case. What I did often see, however, is that various vendors would give a very long free trial and free hardware to the prisons I worked with, with the basic idea being to lock them in when the obscenely high normal rates kick in after the free year or however long the trial was
- Nextgrid 6y agoAn offline Wikipedia by mail could be a good idea. When a page is printed and sent, every link should be numbered and they can mail back a letter with link numbers and get back the Wikipedia pages for those links, allowing them to browse it that way.