Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

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-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.

So ebooks then? What bad could possibly done by providing free access to public domain works, and access to library schemes?

Seems dangerous. The external server might base64 some fentanyl and send it along as a header.

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

The tablet that meets that requirement is made by JPay - https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgav3m/a-clear-plastic-table... and it does have ebooks - 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

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.

Just give them Internet access. It's malicious not to. Nobody can claim to be rehabilitating prisoners while also not giving them internet access.

Also, weed.

The point of most prisons is cruelty, not rehabilitation.

This is definitely true in the United States. No rehabilitation and trying to make money off them.

I would say cruelty is the byproduct of unchecked value extraction.

What's the problem with that? We shouldn't even be putting people in jail for using drugs in the first place, much less making drug use a pretense for withholding reading material.

If they're copying all letters that come in and giving the copies to the prisoners, then it seems like an earnest effort to block the medium, not the content. So it doesn't seem like a pretense to me.

I don't think that forcing books to be new and routed through specific, graft-ridden profit centers guarantees that books won't be adulterated at all.

Any supply chain can be manipulated and corrupted for profit.

> used books being donated

> Wisconsin prison inmates will begin receiving photocopies of their mail

Of their mail

So these are unrelated situations. Justifying banning books or monetary exploitation with FUD like this is exactly the kind of reasoning that leads to the incarceration rates and policies we have in this country.

This is an example of paper products being used as a medium for getting drugs into the prison. It happens with used books too. The article that I linked was a specific example of it being used with paper - in that case mail.

Used books or books printed from publishers/distributors where it is possible to introduce drugs into it are similarly problematic - which leads to the "only approved vendors."

The key is it happens.

This particular example isn't about banning reading material - it is about eliminating one of the ways that contraband gets into the prisons.

No, it doesn't eliminate all of them.

The financial criticisms of some of the contracts between states and vendors is completely justified. Some states are better / more fair than others in this regard.

Drugs cost money. Donations through charities aren't going to occasionally contain drugs just as a gift to random prisoners.

"Some of the criticisms are justified but we have to do something" is the start of the FUD I'm talking about. Do we? Examine the premises instead. As the article notes smuggling by guards is apparently an expected vector when running a prison, and yet this comment section is taking these anecdotes at face value without any evidence of, say, widespread drug smuggling through charities donating books to prisons.

Paper was being soaked in drugs. Books and letters are both paper.

Perhaps solve the problem that leads them to being deprived enough to be down to smoke laced paper in a makeshift prison pipe or w/e apparatus they use.

I’ve personally bought new books from Amazon and had them shipped directly to a prisoner in accordance with their written policies, where they were confiscated without explanation upon arrival.

They were about the history of civil rights movement and racial discrimination in the American legal system, which I’m sure is just a coincidence.

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