This is part of time, onlineFuture Tense series on how technology is changing prison.
One evening in July 2020, I was walking around the house talking on the phone with my grandmother. The coronavirus pandemic had halted visitation at the prison where my uncle was incarcerated, but they had just introduced video calls, and she was trying to figure out how to schedule and pay for the call. We didn't know it at the time, but my grandmother only had a few months left with my uncle. These video calls – no matter how imperfect, expensive and annoying – made some of their last moments together easier.
Prisons are never separate from the rest of our lives. They are part of the growing social, political and technological ecosystems with which we all interact. My own experience with technology in prisons—the video calls my grandmother used, the messaging systems I rely on to stay in touch with sources, the radio I once carried when I was teaching imprisoned writers—has always been defined by an ambivalence: I feel grateful that such technology exists, because I don't know what I would do without her. And I feel angry at all the ways he continues to let down the people who depend on him.
There are currently approximately 1.9 million people incarcerated in the United States, and an estimated 45 percent of Americans have at some point experienced the incarceration of an immediate family member. (For black Americans, that number rises to 63 percent.) For many years, prisons were largely technology bunkers, isolating prisoners from the outside world. But things are starting to change. In some cases, they changed because prison leaders recognized the need to connect prisoners to their communities. In other cases, they changed because prisons, in their relationship with private companies, found a way to make a profit.
The pandemic has accelerated this trend. Activities such as visitation and education programs were temporarily halted, and in many cases replaced by video calls, emails, and other virtual activities, facilitated in part by faulty, custom-made tablets distributed by private companies. As a result, things like tablets and emails — which may seem trivial to those of us on the outside but can be transformative on the inside — are now commonplace in prisons and jails across the country. Instead of being isolated from technology, large parts of prisoners' lives are now mediated through it.
Time, Online, a new package from Future Tense, attempts to document this moment. Through a series of articles written (with one exception) by people currently and formerly incarcerated, we will examine how technology is changing what it means to be in prison. We'll explore what happens when a stream reaches prison and how emails impact romantic relationships. We'll take a look at how prisoners find ways to jailbreak tablets and how to do a Google search from the inside. We'll take a look at what it's like to wear an ankle monitor and have a laptop after 17 years in prison. We'll share diaries documenting how prisoners interact with technology hour by hour, in three different state prison systems, and how much it costs. We will examine the identity of prison technology companies and the powerful financial forces behind them.
To produce this package, we worked with currently and formerly incarcerated writers and artists in Florida, California, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, New York, Michigan, and Georgia. In many cases, we edited drafts using the same old-fashioned systems of emails and expensive phone calls that writers used to sift through their reports. They often wrote entire drafts on their tablets and sent them in text message-sized chunks. In one state, they were charged by the minute to do so; In other cases, we were charged fees ranging from $0.05 to $0.47 per message. Artists had to navigate unreliable mailrooms to send their artwork abroad, and could do little more than cross their fingers and hope it would reach its destination. Letters are often held up by prison screening systems, and I learned the hard way which words or phrases can cause a letter to be delayed for days or weeks, if not indefinitely. While communicating with a writer from California, I couldn't kick the drug habit piece, the word I often use to describe an “essay” or “essay,” which has delayed at least a dozen letters. (pieceI concluded that it was marked as indicating a gun.) In a North Carolina prison, I was careful to avoid the words black And whitewhich is also sometimes marked.
The essays and artwork in this series paint a vivid picture of how technology is changing and shaping the lives of incarcerated people. Technology will also determine the future of prisons and their associated communities. It's worth understanding how.
thanks for the Empowerment Street And College inside To help them connect with incarcerated writers and artists for this package.
Future Tense is a partnership between Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that studies emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
