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Yeah, but you can't provide the Internet because there are those who will use it to coordinate crimes. So that leaves choices:

* No programming

* Programming with no Internet

Preload it with books.

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Dave Beazley did it AND talked about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8

Summary: he was involved in patent litigation and had to analyse a codebase on a computer locked in a vault. He couldn't bring in any electronics but he did discover that Python was installed on the machine he was using. The video describes the rest.

How about providing web access through remote desktop that has a browser with websockets, flash, and non-GET requests disabled and only retrieving pages through a squid cache?

Sounds like it'd be a variable result. eg depending on the skill and personality of the person involved, over time they may or may not learn to exploit that system too.

They could just solicited donations of programming books for prison libraries. There are a few million prisoners in America, getting one programing book for every ten prisoners would only mean a few hundred thousand books. I'm sure that many could be scrounged up. That's really not that many books in the grand scheme of things. And for such a worthy cause, I'm sure you wouldn't have trouble finding people to donate a book.

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