Most workplaces block certain websites anyway so I don't see why they could not do the same thing for inmates. Maybe they shouldn't be using Tor, but I don't see why Wikipedia is a problem.
It is ridiculous how some dangerous inmates manage to communicate with the outside world and continue to commit crimes through their network. By allowing them to use Wikipedia, they can leave coded messages as orders for fellow gang members. This happens with traditional mail and you can bet it'll be more wide spread with Internet access.
I believe prisoners need the ability to learn and improve themselves while in prison but the problem is much more complicated than ban tor and allow Wikipedia.
You'd also want to limit it to the most vetted and monitored articles to prevent someone from the outside from leaving coded messages in articles. I figure the more popular articles could spot strange updates and eliminate them.
There's also nothing urgent about the access they get. Articles could be restricted to 1 or 2 years old to further prevent the transfer of timely information.
Honestly, is this really that big of a concern? This sounds like something that may be necessary for the OBLs or <murderous drug lord>s of the world. But in general, this level of paranoia about being able to communicate with the outside world is just insane. It only serves as an easy excuse to exert an obscene level of control over these people's lives.
From what I've seen (in documentaries and the show lockup raw) violent offenders will try to harm the families of prison personnel and others by sending and receiving orders. It's a real problem. It's not as easy as restricting access from just these people because they can force other inmates with Internet access to do their bidding.
Its possible that lower security prisoners can be treated differently.
Sure, the process in my mind is the same as when they are given a TV. There is some level of filtering on what information they can obtain and a time delay of when they obtain it. Regardless there is so much information out there that even if you drop entire categories from a Wikipedia dump, it would still be left with a substantial ammount of knowledge for inmates to learn from.
Isn't worrying about coded info coming into the prison a bit silly, given that inmates have visiting rights? What kind of code could you put into a wikipedia article that you couldn't provide in a face-to-face?
How hard it would be to develop a patched browser (on a secured os, plus a firewall of course) that would only allow "read only web access" (not form submitting, no way to manually go to an url by entering it) to a limited number of domains? I guess the number of dangerous inmates with advanced tech skills or outside resources is very low, so you could separate these high risk guys from the rest of the pack. There's the possibility of high risk guys using the low-risk guys to communicate for them, but really, I don't think there are that many "criminal masterminds" out there... I mean the really dangerous ones are either in high security prisons, or they are too smart to get into prison anyhow.
Very hard in a general sense. Many prisons are giving people walled garden access to legal libraries and video conferencing, but nothing else.
I've done some peripheral work for corrections type people -- they don't adopt paranoid thought processes for nothing.
The average drug convict is not a criminal mastermind, but he is a cog in a criminal enterprise that is controlled by smart people. Drug and gang enterprises are real businesses, and they provide support and resources to their employees. They are capable of anything.
This level of paranoia is just insane. Let's not legitimize the war on drugs by elevating any sort of communication with the outside world into some sort of existential threat to civilized society.
Kill messages are so easy to get in as it is that I doubt internet access would have a huge impact. Even so, there are ways to mitigate it. Graduated access due to good behavior seems like an obvious one. The point is, we treat all inmates as if they're potential murderous drug kingpins. And this is exactly why the recidivism rate is so high. There are much better ways to rehabilitate than what we are doing today.
I agree -- I'm not defending the policy, I'm just trying to point out that these polices don't come out of a vacuum. People who run prisons are concerned about the welfare of their people first.
Even a GET is a signal. As henchman on the outside I can create a page, linked from my wikipedia personal page or on some otherwise innocuous page, that says something like "Boss, should I off Big Tony? Click here for Yes, Click here for No" and wait to see which link he clicks.
Rather than a dump on a prison server, it would be easier to get Wikipedia to block the prison IP range from editing. I believe that some schools (high schools/secondary schools, not universities) do this due to high rates of vandalism.
The "prison IP range"? What's that? There are literally thousands of prisons in the US (4500. We've got more than any other country in the world, go us.)
Wikipedia certainly is not interested in the task of trying to track the IP addresses of each of these prisons.
(Also, I can guarantee you that the vast majority of these prisons are served by under-resourced barely-competent IT departments.)
(Also, it may not even be possible to distinguish between 'inmate' IP addresses, and IP addresses used by staff, or even staff working for the department of corrections not even physically at the prison. Why? Because there's no such thing as an 'inmate IP address', because right now inmates aren't allowed to use the internet at all. So you're asking under-resourced barely competent IT departments to set up a new IP address allocation regime. At 4500 different prisons.)
I think it is, in the sense that the US is a country founded on one group of people imprisoning and disposessing other groups of people for economic profit, with those groups differentiated by ethnicity. But NOT if you're suggesting that a place with a hetereogenous ethnic or cultural makeup is neccesarily more violent or something.
Also, in fact, when you say "in other places with X, the incarceration rate doesn't seem to be as high", X can be _anything_. The US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, by a fairly wide margin. So in EVERY other place, with any characteristic at all, the incarceration rate isn't as high. Not in Scandinavia, not in China, not in any part of Africa, not in Mexico, not anywhere. The US is alone.
