29 ms·

The American prison system’s war on reading

426 points by misiti3780 5y ago

maerF0x0 5y ago
so, why cant they just get access to a library of ebooks which the state has cryptographically signed? Wouldn't that make books universally accessible and also secure the state's fears that there would be contraband/hidden messages?
- Bud 5y ago
  That's a pretty easy one: the e-book readers would be prohibitively expensive, plus those require charging, plus they require tech support. I'm pretty sure that's not going to fly in your usual for-profit prison system. Let's just stick to used books.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Could the charities circumvent it by unifying into a large books for prisoners organization and becoming an "approved vendor"?
- chongli 5y ago
  No, they won't ever become an approved vendor. The people profiting from this have close ties to those who approve vendors. Approving the charities would erode those profits. The whole US prison system is corrupt to the core. It's one of the (if not the) ugliest stains on the entire country. It's a continuation of slavery by other means.
  - maerF0x0 5y ago
    > It's a continuation of slavery by other means. This is the part that shocks me. With nearly universal agreement that slavery is bad, how does the approximate equivalent continue?
    - Avshalom 5y ago
      Well the reality is that we have nearly universal agreement to say that slavery is bad. That's not the same thing.
    - 72736379 5y ago
      The way the 13th amendment is written is how: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction". This is why penal labor is explicitly allowed, and why this population is milked for money (re: charging by the minute to read a free book available under public domain).
      - kingcharles 5y ago
        Yes. There are now more black people legally owned as slaves than there were in the 1800s. It's just that the government owns them all now. The USA didn't abolish slavery it just made it illegal for private corporations to own them. Of course, the private corporations now rent them from the government.
        maerF0x0 5y ago
        Is it possible/optional that companies could employee these inmates in a non-abusive way? eg; could a company opt to pay them minimum wage or educational benefits?
        shagie 5y ago
        Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/business/economy/labor-market-inmates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/business/economy/labor-ma... > Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum-security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned $14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company’s line of semitrailers. > After he was released, Mr. Forseth kept right on working at Stoughton. But instead of riding in the prison van, he drives to work in the 2015 Ford Fusion he bought with the money he saved while incarcerated. > Work-release programs have often been criticized for exploiting inmates by forcing them to work grueling jobs for pay that is often well below minimum wage. But the Wisconsin program is voluntary, and inmates are paid market wages. State officials say the program gives inmates a chance to build up some savings, learn vocational skills and prepare for life after prison.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    The jail I was at used Google Street View to determine if the vendor had a shop open to the public at the address they mailed the books from. If they did they would assume all their used books were tainted and would refuse them.
krallja 5y ago
> Now, imagine if the State of Massachusetts had defunded its libraries and banned anyone from sending books behind prison walls—that remarkable evolution might never have occurred, and the world would have lost one of its most important radical voices. The author seems to have found a second “benefit” to the bans.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
I used to be a volunteer teacher for a 3-hour weekly class in a local prison. One of the things this article misses is that gangs – which are especially active in prison systems – use books to pass ciphered messages. Highlighting, underlining, dogeared corners, scratched out characters, etc. are used prolifically as encoded messages that would appear to be regular wear to a casual observer. The "tradecraft" these guys employ is amazing (albeit for a horrible purpose). We were allowed to have books shipped directly from publishers or known third-party entities (e.g., Amazon) and there was a request form an instructor could fill to add new approved vendors. All that to say, I understand the policy, even though it's not ideal for those honestly wanting to read. It's hard for most people to imagine but a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes, and there are real cases of warring gangs orchestrating "hits" on other gang members through innocuous looking content.
- shimonabi 5y ago
  Could you not solve this by introducting a time delay before the same book can be borrowed again? It's 2021. Why not just allow a simple e-reader?
- saargrin 5y ago
  i would have never imagined that, but thinking about it,its actually a brilliant tactic
- worik 5y ago
  > a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes Some of the prisoners are quite bad too
- rkk3 5y ago
  We should probably remove their ability to read, write or speak all together, just in case something bad could come from it.
  - s5300 5y ago
    Less than lethals used during prison riots take eyes out every now and then.
worik 5y ago
Private prisons. Profit from misery. Just shows that some very big crooks are within the law
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  I think some pretty valid explanations have been shared with sources on the way contraband can be transported via the books. Not saying we can't use alternative solutions, but your comment doesn't really support further discussion.
  - msbarnett 5y ago
    > Not saying we can't use alternative solutions, but your comment doesn't really support further discussion Sure it does. We can only discuss solutions if we’re willing to accurately describe ALL of the causes of the problem. The article we’re discussing is entirely about how the “contraband” claim appears to be a flimsy excuse that both doesn’t impact the primary source of contraband (the guards), and obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with issues like: > With e-books, the situation is even worse, as companies like Global Tel Link supply supposedly “free” tablets which actually charge their users by the minute to read. Even public-domain classics, available on Project Gutenberg, are only available at a price under these systems—and prisons, in turn, receive a 5% commission on every charge. “Books can smuggle contraband” has no explanatory power wrt marked up access to free ebooks. Profit motive does. It’s you, rather than the person you’re responding to, who seems to be shutting down discussion of solutions by trying to rule discussion of private for-profit prisons making profit-optimal decisions that may be net-worse for society somehow out-of-bounds.
- wombatpm 5y ago
  Seems like misaligned incentives. Perhaps the prisons should be charged a fee for each case of recidivism
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  So it's ok when the state does it? The state(s) is just as complicit in all this crap as the private prisons are.
shagie 5y ago
One of the things that happens with used books being donated is that the paper will be used as a medium for getting contraband drugs into the prison. An example of this (letters) https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/wisconsin-inmates-to-get-photocopies-of-personal-mail-to-curb-use-of-paper-laced-with-drugs/ https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/wisconsin-inmates-to-get-photo... > Wisconsin prison inmates will begin receiving photocopies of their mail next month as officials attempt to stem the flow of paper laced with drugs into correctional facilities. > The Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) said paper and envelopes can be sprayed or soaked in synthetic cannabinoids such as K2 and then sent into prisons, where they are torn into strips and smoked and sold to inmates. > The Fox Lake prison switched to photocopying prison mail in April after nine “potential overdoses” and two incidents of violent behavior connected to drug use. In the months since, the prison has seen numbers in both categories drop before reaching zero in August, officials said. That's for a single sheet of paper - consider the difficulty of verifying that a couple hundred pages of a novel haven't been tampered with. One of the easier ways to do this is to have the book be new and come directly from a distributor.
- fredley 5y ago
  So ebooks then? What bad could possibly done by providing free access to public domain works, and access to library schemes?
  - koboll 5y ago
    Seems dangerous. The external server might base64 some fentanyl and send it along as a header.
  - shagie 5y ago
    That is the approach that is used, though it gets tricky. The items that an inmate can own have to be clear (so they can't be used to store contraband) and tamper proof... and if they're electric, run on regular batteries or wall current. This leads to things like a clear typewriter - http://www.swintec.com/clear-typewriters/10-2410cc.html http://www.swintec.com/clear-typewriters/10-2410cc.html The tablet that meets that requirement is made by JPay - https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgav3m/a-clear-plastic-tablet-for-prisoners-the-motherboard-review https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgav3m/a-clear-plastic-table... and it does have ebooks - https://www.jpay.com/education.aspx https://www.jpay.com/education.aspx . I will point to their wikipedia page as something to read about them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPay One of the considerations for this is that no-one is going to give wifi and unrestricted (and unmonitored) access to the internet at large. All of the "this is stuff that you can download" needs to be accessible via another set of servers hosted somewhere with all of the associated infrastructure.
RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
I know the reading experience is different but perhaps they could benefit from using (offline) Kindle?
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  The article mentions that they have those. The e-readers charge prisoners 5 cents per minute to read most books, including public domain works. The prisoners are paid about $0.25/hr for working, so reading for an hour would take about four hours of labor.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    "The paperback version of 1984 is about 330 pages. It will take a person who is able to read 30 pages per hour about 11 hours to read the novel. At the discounted $0.03/minute usage fee, 11 hours of reading a free book will cost a person about $19.80—and this is if you don’t stop to think or re-read."[1] That's at the temporarily discounted 3 cents/minute rate. Also, from the same source: "For one, WVDCR will receive a 5% commission on gross revenue, including fees from video visitation." Which explains the whole thing. That's 5% of gross revenue...not profits. Ouch. [1] https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much-does-it-cost-to-read-a-free-book-on-a-free-tablet/ https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much...
  - scottcodie 5y ago
    The prices are high because they know families will subsidize the costs. Colleges also employ this same tactic.
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Yes. Most things in jails and prisons are paid for by the families, not the incarcerated person. Some smart jurisdictions are wising up to this and banning this profiting from the person's family: https://sftreasurer.org/san-francisco-will-become-first-county-nation-stop-generating-revenue-incarcerated-people-and-their https://sftreasurer.org/san-francisco-will-become-first-coun...
QuarterReptile 5y ago
Given all these discussions about drug laced paper makes you wonder if a system of shuffling books could be employed. Given the price of media mail, it seems like prisons could just do regular swaps so that the books always came from someone else's collection. Ideally, you'd get a tragedy of the commons where all the books stopped being drugs because no one was getting back what they put into it.
- dumbfoundded 5y ago
  The problem isn't logistical. Numerous solutions exist to make books available in some form that doesn't create much risk. The problem is the lack of desire to create more humane conditions in US prisons. Many large companies depend on prison labor and they somehow found a way to have their whole supply chain go through a prison. I'm sure if they wanted to, they could throw in a few books.
xiaodai 5y ago
Was part of a church group that helped out at prisons. Many of them were illiterate.... Not sure how many of them can read
- tyingq 5y ago
  The "American prison system" is a pretty broad brush that includes county jails (people do end up there for months/years), state run facilities, federal facilities, etc. Pretty sure as a whole, most of the prison population can read.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    In other threads I've been flamed for the pedantry of conflating prison vs jail. Smart people avoid thinking about the US prison system and will defend their views rather than admitting it's full of hard problems, for which they have no good answers...while criticizing that everyone else is doing it wrong.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      I do agree there are hard problems. But truly free books is easy to solve.
- op00to 5y ago
  How can you be “not sure how many of them can read” when in the previous sentence you state “many of them were illiterate”?
- kingcharles 5y ago
  The worst thing is those who cannot read. In the county jails I was at for many years there was literally _nothing_ to do except read. Imagine being stuck in your cell for 21 hours a day (average in the jails I was in) and can only stare at the walls because you can't read. Especially worse if you are in a single-man cell and can't even annoy your cellmate all day for a little conversation.
pm90 5y ago
I’m genuinely terrified of the American Prison system. I had a brief brush with the Law at one point in the past; but reading about what goes on in there and how it completely fucks over people is just incredible. I sincerely believe that if there’s any one thing that will end the American experiment, it will be its Prison system. Generations of poor people being brutalized and radicalized, creating an incredibly violent culture both inside and out… it’s just not sustainable to keep imprisoning millions of people. I don’t know what the solution is. I suspect we will need to invest massively in both keeping people out of prisons and creating conditions in society that make it less likely for people to fall into destitution.
- jordanpg 5y ago
  I agree. Along with the death penalty, the history books are going to be extremely unkind to us on this, and deservedly so. “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- pkukkapalli 5y ago
  Yeah, I feel like this article's outrage at the inability of prisoners to get used books is unwarranted. What actually deserves this level of outrage is the violence encountered by many in prison as you mentioned. Imagine going to prison for a small-time felony, and having to deal with widespread rape[1], gangs[2], and drugs[3]. Many of the people are in prison did seriously bad things, and should be allowed out any time soon. But, the eighth amendment also says people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment [4]. But perhaps I'm just soft like Tom DuBois from The Boondoks. [1]:https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/25/prison-rape-allegations-are-on-the-rise https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/25/prison-rape-al... [2]:https://hcsdmass.org/inmates-join-prison-gangs/ https://hcsdmass.org/inmates-join-prison-gangs/ [3]:https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/11/07/the-never-ending-drug-hustle-behind-bars https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/11/07/the-never-endi... [4]:https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment
  - rileymat2 5y ago
jdjdjrj 5y ago
Any time there is an article on HN about prisons, most of the comments are kooky conspiracy theories. The concept that bad people intent on committing crime exist seems to be incomprehensible to many if not most in this audience for some reason. The article itself is biased and not founded in any rational reasoning. It recognizes the potential for contraband for books coming from random sources then justifies it merely because "most contraband comes from guards anyway" or so it says. The original source linked to in this article was a better and more objective read: https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-29/iowa-state-prisons-ban-family-members-third-parties-from-sending-books-to-inmates https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-29/iowa-sta...
- int_19h 5y ago
  I can't see anybody seriously arguing that bad people intent on commiting crime exist; the questions, rather, is "how many people?", "how bad are they really?", "how serious the crime is?", and "is locking them up really the best way to deal with it?". But even ignoring all that, there are clearly better ways to deal with contraband.
  - jdjdjrj 5y ago
    Those questions you ask were already decided in a court of law by an elected or appointed judge and a jury of the subject's peers. And if there is a better way to deal with contraband then what is it? HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic.
    - ohyeshedid 5y ago
      > HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic. Where does your expertise in this topic come from?
      - jdjdjrj 5y ago
        Where did I claim to be an expert? I'm referring to the actions taken by the experts who oversee the prison system mentioned in the article.
Avshalom 5y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ruined 5y ago
books to prisoners does a lot of good work providing free books for prisoners, and they have a comprehensive list of prisoner reading restrictions by state https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/banned-book-lists/ https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/banned-book-lists/ includes banned titles, banned subject matter, banned formats, lists of accepted books, and so on. it looks like until now Iowa was one of the more permissive states.
pkrotich 5y ago
Forget books - the cost of phone calls from/to inmates cannot be justified in this age and day. I can understand the need to limit calls but the cost is simply exploitive to put it mildly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ddtaylor 5y ago
FWIW this is how federal prison is as well. All books that don't come from manufacturers or authorized sellers (Amazon, etc.) are returned upon arrival. > as little as 25 cents an hour for their labor, many can’t afford even that. Try $0.80 per MONTH which is how much you make in federal prison in the basic jobs.
- albertopv 5y ago
  That is just plain slavery.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - adultSwim 5y ago
    Yes. That's a loophole written into the 13th amendment. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States
eftychis 5y ago
I think the prison system in the U.S. tells a lot about humanity and how democracy is (not) implemented. First of all, removing someone's access and right to speech and voting, is degenerative to the society. We send people to prison to punish them and punish our future as a society, and not acting rationally and in the original meaning of the Greek word "to punish" (τιμωρώ) which (approximately) meant to help. What do you teach a prisoner by paying them 25cents or less for honest work...???
- sytelus 5y ago
  The idea, perhaps inadventerily proposed by US constitution, is that citizens have rights with corollary that prisoners and non-citizens don't. It is nauseating how acceptable it is that non-citizens and prisoners are not entitled to pursuits of happiness. It's one thing to punish murderers so harshly and quite another thing to roll up shoplifters into same groups and strip them of virtually all of their rights.
  - sobkas 5y ago
    > It's one thing to punish murderers You know that this murderer can be a wife that killed her abusive husband. Or other similar circumstances. Not all murderers are evil.
kingcharles 5y ago
I was teaching C# to the detainees in one jail. I only had the compiler that was installed in the Windows folder, but no reference docs. I tried to get a C# book mailed in, but it was refused as it "could be used to hack [my] way out of the jail." Luckily one of the nuns at the jail took pity on me, ordered it herself from Amazon and smuggled it in, complete with enclosed CD-ROM. I could only do command-line apps, so I taught them how to write a text adventure :)
nathias 5y ago
looks like that abolition of slavery we keep hearing about was more like a soft phasing out ...
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
"Department Of Corrections" is a little Orwellian, a little Pythonesque. I can imagine a little old lady in a tweed suit going around town and correcting the spelling of shop signs and graffiti with a red marker. It's rather more unpleasant in real life though. Why not just call it "Department of Prisons" and be over with it? It's like how in Greece we have the "Ministry for Protection of the Citizen", which is responsible for sending riot police to teargas pensioners and club teachers on the heads when they demonstrate. It used to be the "Public Order Ministry" but everyone made the obvious joke about it ("Public disorder"). So we need police and a mininster to supervise them? Call it "Ministry of Police". Why beat around the bush? For the sake of whom?
- uhhyeahdude 5y ago
  Pynchonesque?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    That works too :)
- kingcharles 5y ago
  It's even worse when it is applied to county jails where there are pretrial detainees who are only suspected of crimes and are technically still innocent in the eyes of the law. https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/departments/cook-county-department-of-corrections/ https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/departments/cook-county-de...
albertopv 5y ago
I read many examples of why this is acceptable, but they are all based on the concept that lowering the bar is the way, that because there some (many?) bad guys then all must accept what for me are incredible life limitations, it seems being imprisoned is not enough. USA prison system is designed to perpetually preserve it self.

426 points by misiti3780 5y ago

so, why cant they just get access to a library of ebooks which the state has cryptographically signed? Wouldn't that make books universally accessible and also secure the state's fears that there would be contraband/hidden messages?

Bud 5y ago
That's a pretty easy one: the e-book readers would be prohibitively expensive, plus those require charging, plus they require tech support. I'm pretty sure that's not going to fly in your usual for-profit prison system. Let's just stick to used books.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Could the charities circumvent it by unifying into a large books for prisoners organization and becoming an "approved vendor"?

chongli 5y ago
No, they won't ever become an approved vendor. The people profiting from this have close ties to those who approve vendors. Approving the charities would erode those profits. The whole US prison system is corrupt to the core. It's one of the (if not the) ugliest stains on the entire country. It's a continuation of slavery by other means.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  > It's a continuation of slavery by other means. This is the part that shocks me. With nearly universal agreement that slavery is bad, how does the approximate equivalent continue?
  - Avshalom 5y ago
    Well the reality is that we have nearly universal agreement to say that slavery is bad. That's not the same thing.
  - 72736379 5y ago
    The way the 13th amendment is written is how: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction". This is why penal labor is explicitly allowed, and why this population is milked for money (re: charging by the minute to read a free book available under public domain).
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Yes. There are now more black people legally owned as slaves than there were in the 1800s. It's just that the government owns them all now. The USA didn't abolish slavery it just made it illegal for private corporations to own them. Of course, the private corporations now rent them from the government.
      - maerF0x0 5y ago
        Is it possible/optional that companies could employee these inmates in a non-abusive way? eg; could a company opt to pay them minimum wage or educational benefits?
        shagie 5y ago
        Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/business/economy/labor-market-inmates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/business/economy/labor-ma... > Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum-security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned $14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company’s line of semitrailers. > After he was released, Mr. Forseth kept right on working at Stoughton. But instead of riding in the prison van, he drives to work in the 2015 Ford Fusion he bought with the money he saved while incarcerated. > Work-release programs have often been criticized for exploiting inmates by forcing them to work grueling jobs for pay that is often well below minimum wage. But the Wisconsin program is voluntary, and inmates are paid market wages. State officials say the program gives inmates a chance to build up some savings, learn vocational skills and prepare for life after prison.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  The jail I was at used Google Street View to determine if the vendor had a shop open to the public at the address they mailed the books from. If they did they would assume all their used books were tainted and would refuse them.

krallja 5y ago

> Now, imagine if the State of Massachusetts had defunded its libraries and banned anyone from sending books behind prison walls—that remarkable evolution might never have occurred, and the world would have lost one of its most important radical voices. The author seems to have found a second “benefit” to the bans.

ARandomerDude 5y ago

I used to be a volunteer teacher for a 3-hour weekly class in a local prison. One of the things this article misses is that gangs – which are especially active in prison systems – use books to pass ciphered messages. Highlighting, underlining, dogeared corners, scratched out characters, etc. are used prolifically as encoded messages that would appear to be regular wear to a casual observer. The "tradecraft" these guys employ is amazing (albeit for a horrible purpose). We were allowed to have books shipped directly from publishers or known third-party entities (e.g., Amazon) and there was a request form an instructor could fill to add new approved vendors. All that to say, I understand the policy, even though it's not ideal for those honestly wanting to read. It's hard for most people to imagine but a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes, and there are real cases of warring gangs orchestrating "hits" on other gang members through innocuous looking content.

shimonabi 5y ago
Could you not solve this by introducting a time delay before the same book can be borrowed again? It's 2021. Why not just allow a simple e-reader?
saargrin 5y ago
i would have never imagined that, but thinking about it,its actually a brilliant tactic
worik 5y ago
> a lot of the people in prison are some seriously bad dudes Some of the prisoners are quite bad too
rkk3 5y ago
We should probably remove their ability to read, write or speak all together, just in case something bad could come from it.
- s5300 5y ago
  Less than lethals used during prison riots take eyes out every now and then.

worik 5y ago

Private prisons. Profit from misery. Just shows that some very big crooks are within the law

darkwizard42 5y ago
I think some pretty valid explanations have been shared with sources on the way contraband can be transported via the books. Not saying we can't use alternative solutions, but your comment doesn't really support further discussion.
- msbarnett 5y ago
  > Not saying we can't use alternative solutions, but your comment doesn't really support further discussion Sure it does. We can only discuss solutions if we’re willing to accurately describe ALL of the causes of the problem. The article we’re discussing is entirely about how the “contraband” claim appears to be a flimsy excuse that both doesn’t impact the primary source of contraband (the guards), and obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with issues like: > With e-books, the situation is even worse, as companies like Global Tel Link supply supposedly “free” tablets which actually charge their users by the minute to read. Even public-domain classics, available on Project Gutenberg, are only available at a price under these systems—and prisons, in turn, receive a 5% commission on every charge. “Books can smuggle contraband” has no explanatory power wrt marked up access to free ebooks. Profit motive does. It’s you, rather than the person you’re responding to, who seems to be shutting down discussion of solutions by trying to rule discussion of private for-profit prisons making profit-optimal decisions that may be net-worse for society somehow out-of-bounds.
wombatpm 5y ago
Seems like misaligned incentives. Perhaps the prisons should be charged a fee for each case of recidivism
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
So it's ok when the state does it? The state(s) is just as complicit in all this crap as the private prisons are.

shagie 5y ago

One of the things that happens with used books being donated is that the paper will be used as a medium for getting contraband drugs into the prison. An example of this (letters) https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/wisconsin-inmates-to-get-photocopies-of-personal-mail-to-curb-use-of-paper-laced-with-drugs/ https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/wisconsin-inmates-to-get-photo... > Wisconsin prison inmates will begin receiving photocopies of their mail next month as officials attempt to stem the flow of paper laced with drugs into correctional facilities. > The Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) said paper and envelopes can be sprayed or soaked in synthetic cannabinoids such as K2 and then sent into prisons, where they are torn into strips and smoked and sold to inmates. > The Fox Lake prison switched to photocopying prison mail in April after nine “potential overdoses” and two incidents of violent behavior connected to drug use. In the months since, the prison has seen numbers in both categories drop before reaching zero in August, officials said. That's for a single sheet of paper - consider the difficulty of verifying that a couple hundred pages of a novel haven't been tampered with. One of the easier ways to do this is to have the book be new and come directly from a distributor.

fredley 5y ago
So ebooks then? What bad could possibly done by providing free access to public domain works, and access to library schemes?
- koboll 5y ago
  Seems dangerous. The external server might base64 some fentanyl and send it along as a header.
- shagie 5y ago
  That is the approach that is used, though it gets tricky. The items that an inmate can own have to be clear (so they can't be used to store contraband) and tamper proof... and if they're electric, run on regular batteries or wall current. This leads to things like a clear typewriter - http://www.swintec.com/clear-typewriters/10-2410cc.html http://www.swintec.com/clear-typewriters/10-2410cc.html The tablet that meets that requirement is made by JPay - https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgav3m/a-clear-plastic-tablet-for-prisoners-the-motherboard-review https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgav3m/a-clear-plastic-table... and it does have ebooks - https://www.jpay.com/education.aspx https://www.jpay.com/education.aspx . I will point to their wikipedia page as something to read about them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPay One of the considerations for this is that no-one is going to give wifi and unrestricted (and unmonitored) access to the internet at large. All of the "this is stuff that you can download" needs to be accessible via another set of servers hosted somewhere with all of the associated infrastructure.

RyEgswuCsn 5y ago

I know the reading experience is different but perhaps they could benefit from using (offline) Kindle?

CobrastanJorji 5y ago
The article mentions that they have those. The e-readers charge prisoners 5 cents per minute to read most books, including public domain works. The prisoners are paid about $0.25/hr for working, so reading for an hour would take about four hours of labor.
- tyingq 5y ago
  "The paperback version of 1984 is about 330 pages. It will take a person who is able to read 30 pages per hour about 11 hours to read the novel. At the discounted $0.03/minute usage fee, 11 hours of reading a free book will cost a person about $19.80—and this is if you don’t stop to think or re-read."[1] That's at the temporarily discounted 3 cents/minute rate. Also, from the same source: "For one, WVDCR will receive a 5% commission on gross revenue, including fees from video visitation." Which explains the whole thing. That's 5% of gross revenue...not profits. Ouch. [1] https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much-does-it-cost-to-read-a-free-book-on-a-free-tablet/ https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much...
- scottcodie 5y ago
  The prices are high because they know families will subsidize the costs. Colleges also employ this same tactic.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Yes. Most things in jails and prisons are paid for by the families, not the incarcerated person. Some smart jurisdictions are wising up to this and banning this profiting from the person's family: https://sftreasurer.org/san-francisco-will-become-first-county-nation-stop-generating-revenue-incarcerated-people-and-their https://sftreasurer.org/san-francisco-will-become-first-coun...

QuarterReptile 5y ago

Given all these discussions about drug laced paper makes you wonder if a system of shuffling books could be employed. Given the price of media mail, it seems like prisons could just do regular swaps so that the books always came from someone else's collection. Ideally, you'd get a tragedy of the commons where all the books stopped being drugs because no one was getting back what they put into it.

dumbfoundded 5y ago
The problem isn't logistical. Numerous solutions exist to make books available in some form that doesn't create much risk. The problem is the lack of desire to create more humane conditions in US prisons. Many large companies depend on prison labor and they somehow found a way to have their whole supply chain go through a prison. I'm sure if they wanted to, they could throw in a few books.

xiaodai 5y ago

Was part of a church group that helped out at prisons. Many of them were illiterate.... Not sure how many of them can read

tyingq 5y ago
The "American prison system" is a pretty broad brush that includes county jails (people do end up there for months/years), state run facilities, federal facilities, etc. Pretty sure as a whole, most of the prison population can read.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  In other threads I've been flamed for the pedantry of conflating prison vs jail. Smart people avoid thinking about the US prison system and will defend their views rather than admitting it's full of hard problems, for which they have no good answers...while criticizing that everyone else is doing it wrong.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I do agree there are hard problems. But truly free books is easy to solve.
op00to 5y ago
How can you be “not sure how many of them can read” when in the previous sentence you state “many of them were illiterate”?
kingcharles 5y ago
The worst thing is those who cannot read. In the county jails I was at for many years there was literally _nothing_ to do except read. Imagine being stuck in your cell for 21 hours a day (average in the jails I was in) and can only stare at the walls because you can't read. Especially worse if you are in a single-man cell and can't even annoy your cellmate all day for a little conversation.

pm90 5y ago

I’m genuinely terrified of the American Prison system. I had a brief brush with the Law at one point in the past; but reading about what goes on in there and how it completely fucks over people is just incredible. I sincerely believe that if there’s any one thing that will end the American experiment, it will be its Prison system. Generations of poor people being brutalized and radicalized, creating an incredibly violent culture both inside and out… it’s just not sustainable to keep imprisoning millions of people. I don’t know what the solution is. I suspect we will need to invest massively in both keeping people out of prisons and creating conditions in society that make it less likely for people to fall into destitution.

jordanpg 5y ago
I agree. Along with the death penalty, the history books are going to be extremely unkind to us on this, and deservedly so. “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
pkukkapalli 5y ago
Yeah, I feel like this article's outrage at the inability of prisoners to get used books is unwarranted. What actually deserves this level of outrage is the violence encountered by many in prison as you mentioned. Imagine going to prison for a small-time felony, and having to deal with widespread rape[1], gangs[2], and drugs[3]. Many of the people are in prison did seriously bad things, and should be allowed out any time soon. But, the eighth amendment also says people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment [4]. But perhaps I'm just soft like Tom DuBois from The Boondoks. [1]:https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/25/prison-rape-allegations-are-on-the-rise https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/07/25/prison-rape-al... [2]:https://hcsdmass.org/inmates-join-prison-gangs/ https://hcsdmass.org/inmates-join-prison-gangs/ [3]:https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/11/07/the-never-ending-drug-hustle-behind-bars https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/11/07/the-never-endi... [4]:https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment
- rileymat2 5y ago

jdjdjrj 5y ago

Any time there is an article on HN about prisons, most of the comments are kooky conspiracy theories. The concept that bad people intent on committing crime exist seems to be incomprehensible to many if not most in this audience for some reason. The article itself is biased and not founded in any rational reasoning. It recognizes the potential for contraband for books coming from random sources then justifies it merely because "most contraband comes from guards anyway" or so it says. The original source linked to in this article was a better and more objective read: https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-29/iowa-state-prisons-ban-family-members-third-parties-from-sending-books-to-inmates https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-29/iowa-sta...

int_19h 5y ago
I can't see anybody seriously arguing that bad people intent on commiting crime exist; the questions, rather, is "how many people?", "how bad are they really?", "how serious the crime is?", and "is locking them up really the best way to deal with it?". But even ignoring all that, there are clearly better ways to deal with contraband.
- jdjdjrj 5y ago
  Those questions you ask were already decided in a court of law by an elected or appointed judge and a jury of the subject's peers. And if there is a better way to deal with contraband then what is it? HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic.
  - ohyeshedid 5y ago
    > HN wants to trust the experts on many topics, yet for some reason not on this topic. Where does your expertise in this topic come from?
    - jdjdjrj 5y ago
      Where did I claim to be an expert? I'm referring to the actions taken by the experts who oversee the prison system mentioned in the article.

Avshalom 5y ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ruined 5y ago

books to prisoners does a lot of good work providing free books for prisoners, and they have a comprehensive list of prisoner reading restrictions by state https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/banned-book-lists/ https://www.bookstoprisoners.net/banned-book-lists/ includes banned titles, banned subject matter, banned formats, lists of accepted books, and so on. it looks like until now Iowa was one of the more permissive states.

pkrotich 5y ago

Forget books - the cost of phone calls from/to inmates cannot be justified in this age and day. I can understand the need to limit calls but the cost is simply exploitive to put it mildly.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ddtaylor 5y ago

FWIW this is how federal prison is as well. All books that don't come from manufacturers or authorized sellers (Amazon, etc.) are returned upon arrival. > as little as 25 cents an hour for their labor, many can’t afford even that. Try $0.80 per MONTH which is how much you make in federal prison in the basic jobs.

albertopv 5y ago
That is just plain slavery.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adultSwim 5y ago
  Yes. That's a loophole written into the 13th amendment. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States

eftychis 5y ago

I think the prison system in the U.S. tells a lot about humanity and how democracy is (not) implemented. First of all, removing someone's access and right to speech and voting, is degenerative to the society. We send people to prison to punish them and punish our future as a society, and not acting rationally and in the original meaning of the Greek word "to punish" (τιμωρώ) which (approximately) meant to help. What do you teach a prisoner by paying them 25cents or less for honest work...???

sytelus 5y ago
The idea, perhaps inadventerily proposed by US constitution, is that citizens have rights with corollary that prisoners and non-citizens don't. It is nauseating how acceptable it is that non-citizens and prisoners are not entitled to pursuits of happiness. It's one thing to punish murderers so harshly and quite another thing to roll up shoplifters into same groups and strip them of virtually all of their rights.
- sobkas 5y ago
  > It's one thing to punish murderers You know that this murderer can be a wife that killed her abusive husband. Or other similar circumstances. Not all murderers are evil.

kingcharles 5y ago

I was teaching C# to the detainees in one jail. I only had the compiler that was installed in the Windows folder, but no reference docs. I tried to get a C# book mailed in, but it was refused as it "could be used to hack [my] way out of the jail." Luckily one of the nuns at the jail took pity on me, ordered it herself from Amazon and smuggled it in, complete with enclosed CD-ROM. I could only do command-line apps, so I taught them how to write a text adventure :)

nathias 5y ago

looks like that abolition of slavery we keep hearing about was more like a soft phasing out ...

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

"Department Of Corrections" is a little Orwellian, a little Pythonesque. I can imagine a little old lady in a tweed suit going around town and correcting the spelling of shop signs and graffiti with a red marker. It's rather more unpleasant in real life though. Why not just call it "Department of Prisons" and be over with it? It's like how in Greece we have the "Ministry for Protection of the Citizen", which is responsible for sending riot police to teargas pensioners and club teachers on the heads when they demonstrate. It used to be the "Public Order Ministry" but everyone made the obvious joke about it ("Public disorder"). So we need police and a mininster to supervise them? Call it "Ministry of Police". Why beat around the bush? For the sake of whom?

uhhyeahdude 5y ago
Pynchonesque?
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  That works too :)
kingcharles 5y ago
It's even worse when it is applied to county jails where there are pretrial detainees who are only suspected of crimes and are technically still innocent in the eyes of the law. https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/departments/cook-county-department-of-corrections/ https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/departments/cook-county-de...

albertopv 5y ago

I read many examples of why this is acceptable, but they are all based on the concept that lowering the bar is the way, that because there some (many?) bad guys then all must accept what for me are incredible life limitations, it seems being imprisoned is not enough. USA prison system is designed to perpetually preserve it self.