I know this is controversial, but the humane thing to do is to allow inmates unfettered access to the internet. Contrary to the orthodoxy on the matter, I assert that this will reduce the strength and relevance of 'prison gangs.'
Stopping prisoners from harassing their victims/witnesses against them/enemies or organising others to do their dirty work externally is already a massive problem. Prisons have the ability to listen to calls and read mail to try and curtail it.
Giving them access to the internet makes all of this far easier, and monitoring it far more expensive. Not to mention that now they can use the internet to commit new crimes, and they have nothing better to do for the years or tens of years that they're sitting in a cell.
I think giving them access to email is do-able, since that is no different in practice to physical letters. But giving them unrestricted access is a monitoring nightmare.
And news sites but not the comments sections on those news sites?
It sucks that this is even an issue, I agree. The proposal in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10434720 would be interesting, if workable.
Theoretically, a GET request is only supposed to retrieve data, but it can be (and sometimes is) also used to write data. There's no way for a screening algorithm to know the difference.
That's part of the argument for why those phone calls are so expensive...
Monitoring what someone does on the web would be possible too, of course. At least if you only let them do it for a few minutes at a time like a phone call. Monitoring someone for an hour or more of web browsing is likely to be deathly boring for the one doing the monitoring.
The vast majority of people aren't going to cause any issues.
Even giving most prisoners full, unrestricted access is possible.
Look at prisons in Europe (I’m thinking about Germany here) and you’ll see that it works.
Unfettered access ==> ability to run criminal business, organize groups, stalk victims, perpetrate fraud, etc.
Restricting internet access like you're proposing is presuming their guilt and ruining it for the rest of the inmates.
It isn't designed to tell whether Inmate X is flooding Victim Y's Instagram with veiled threats. You'd have to create an incredibly complex system of rules for each individual inmate in order to do anything close to being effective, and even then, you'd require a level of AI sophistication that doesn't exist yet.
It's just not possible right now.
We're trying to prevent prisoners from communicating. The internet is a tool the sole purpose of which is communication. To be remotely plausible, you'd have to use a very restrictive whitelist approach, something like "you are allowed to send email (through the prison's forwarding server) to the following addresses".
TRULINCS appears to work like this. [0]
I think a lot of the hesitation surrounding a system for giving inmates additional access to the Internet focuses on the premise that all inmates would get access at once, or all the time. But that's not necessary. It could used as a reward for good behavior. Basic monitoring technology already exists, and humans could be employed if absolutely necessary. Additionally, it's easy to know who committed what crime and disqualify them if they're likely get up to no good.
[0] http://wysk.lamp.uscourts.gov/ex-offender-suggestions/trulin...
Further, you can't prevent access to email for the same reason.
Could you elaborate on this? China blocks Facebook/Instagram/Twitter [0] so well that there's an entire industry of VPN providers making bank on getting them access to it illicitly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...