Between the Bars: Snail-mail blogging for prison inmates | Hacker News Reader

Between the Bars: Snail-mail blogging for prison inmates

mako.cc

63 pointsmbrubeck16 comments

After reading the article, I looked into similar services available online. While I couldn't find any blogging sites, both WriteAPrisoner[1] and PrisonPenPals[2], while dated, offer to connect visitors with incarcerated pen pals.

Even more interesting, however, is that the State of Arizona banned these types of interactions in 2000[3], only to have to the law struck down as unconstitutional four years later. Specifically, the law banned any "attempts to correspond with a communication service provider or remote computing service" such as the sites listed above.

[1]: http://www.writeaprisoner.com [2]: http://www.prisonpenpals.com [3]: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/law/1082592378.php

Arizona is notorious for all kinds of crap like this. For instance, they regularly use exposure - putting people out in the sun - as punishment. One women died as a result of this treatment, and no one was prosecuted: http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2010/09/marcia_powe...

Meta HN: Why can't HN allow us to create text anchors, like the rest of the web, reddit, etc. These in-line URLs are getting old, at least to my eyes. HN readers know how to create anchors; this isn't Facebook.

I think the fact that this uses blogs to make the communication one-to-many, rather than connect individuals outside to individuals inside (one-to-one), is a crucial distinction.

When internet access becomes a human right, will prisoners ever be able to get it? This has become an issue since media companies wanted to cut individuals off for breaching copyright, with extensive collateral damage, but I think it has big implications for prisoners rights as well.

I found this one interesting: http://betweenthebars.org/posts/28/untitled

That is interesting indeed. Here's a couple of articles on what got him in there: http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/09/ex-marine-gets-16... and http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35215

I'd have posted it on the site, but unfortunately it doesn't allow anonymous comments or easy sign up (have to come up with a email address and a password and then validate it, bah, I prefer the reddit/HN username+password only design anything beyond that is too much bother).

Thanks for the feedback. We're testing confirmation-less registration now and will likely roll it out later today. It's very important to us that people find it easy to comment (though that's checked by concern for keeping a handle on abuse, given the politics of the site's content).

best, Charlie (BtB staff)

Thanks very much for the reply. Topix has an analysis at http://blog.topix.com/2008/01/anonymous-comments-by-the-numb... of the effects of allowing "anonymous" (no registration, but still with an alias) comments. The results were the percent of abuse didn't change either way since trolls and the like have lots of free time to grab a public email account, but no-registration greatly increased the amount of contribution, and possibly the quality since professionals with limited time and high quality contributions are perhaps less likely to deal with the rigamarole of registration.

Topix does still have a lot of bad comments, but it's more the nature of a small town political board and so attracts a lot of gossip and low IQ people.

I think a better design is HN/Reddit where one has to register but email (with confirmation if presented) is optional in the registration and all registering does is validate the user with a captcha and group their posts so they can be found and maintained (edited/deleted) by the user. I think that topix would be well served in fact to make the slight adjustment to switch to hn/reddit style.

Of course both reddit and HN are notable for having virtually no noticeable spam and being relatively free from abuse especially compared to boards with registration like yahoo news discussions.

Reddit HN and topix all do have a comment feedback mechanism though so that may provide social feedback regarding appropriate comments. These mechanisms do have a weakness though in that they are often used to punish unpopular points of view even when reasonably presented.

OK, so that's on the topic of the social effects of registration methods. I also want to talk about the value and tech implementation of anonymity on such a site but I'll start that in a new comment so as to segregate these.

I've been thinking about your site over the last day. Although there are many sites with good ideas announced on HN, this is the first site announced here that I think has the potential to change society. Obviously the United States is well known to have an unusual take on imprisonment and punishment that is not shared by any other societies in the modern era. Having a place to put together more of the story and follow up is going to be extremely valuable especially since it will have the one voice that was missing, the side of the con. Whether truthful, delusional or outright fabricated, his words will be read and analyzed, often by parties with personal information about the crime, its effects and aftermath.

I see that families of the con, families of the victims, concerned citizens, the many people fascinated by crime, real lawyers, amateur lawyers, judges, police, all will contribute points of view. No doubt some of these will want to make demands that some points of view be removed and this will lead to conflicts.

But overall this will lead to a fruitful discussion and insights about both crime but the way it is handled in our society.

Regarding anonymity, consider the case of a gang member or other member of an organized crime unit in prison for murder is proclaiming his innocence. But a bystander who saw the shooting posts about what he saw. The defense attorney, working on appeal, may also want to know the person's identity and will subpoena the site, unveiling the identity and making it public in court documents. This information would be useful to the gang or organized crime syndicate which would then want to track this person down and kill or intimidate them. If the person's identity is found out he may be killed or harmed. Because of this, it would be best when subpoenaed then to truthfully say "we do not store ip address or browser fingerprint in our logs". DuckDuckGo does it this way (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/duck-duck-go-sea...), and mailinator.com works similarly by keeping everything in RAM and trashing logs that are more than a few hours old. You may wish to implement something similar, and if not, make clear on the site usage policy to contributors that their identities can theoretically be traced.

Could a snailmail/sneakernet gateway to the Web be implemented for prisoners? Email/telnet WWW gateways were used in the early days for people who couldn't install clients, were on intermittent connectivity, etc.

I must admit to fantasising about truckloads of paper rolling in and out of prisons until somebody says "Enough" and gives them Internet access.

The carrier pigeon RFCs could actually be put in to practice here, just think of the potential.

This is a good idea, but transcription for me is a must. Reading the handwritten (sometimes typed) scans of the prisoners writing is just too irritating for me, a person who increasingly relies on Readability to read just about anything on the web.

The last time I looked at freeware OCR software, the accuracy left much to be desired -- but I think it'd be a start, at least on the typed correspondence.

It is transcribed. Just scroll past all of the scanned pages. And seriously, some of the penmanship is pretty good. (e.g. This one seemed very stylized to me, and a lot better than the chicken scratch that a lot of people write with: http://betweenthebars.org/posts/27/scarred-walls-and-more)

Oh I see. Some are and some aren't. I guess transcription is something the site's community helps out with.

What a great idea. Read through some of the blogs and found them compelling.

does anyone else have recurring nightmares about going to prison?

I think its a common theme for people to worry about it - through no malicious intent of your own, ie through circumstances, a lapse in judgement whilst driving etc

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