Prison isn’t set up for today’s tech so we have to do legal work the old way
63 comments
·August 25, 2025pm90
Everyone should want prisons to be better; it isn’t that hard to imagine of some unfortunate circumstances that can lead to you or someone you know ending up there; its in everyone’s best interest to keep it effective, efficient and as painless as possible to make it through the system.
rossant
Yes, and it's a fallacy to imagine you'll never end up there if you don't ever do anything wrong. The proportion of totally innocent people in prison is all but negligible. Hard to believe but true.
pfannkuchen
While true that some people do end up in that situation, I think the probability of the average hner ending up in that situation is basically zero. The people who are overrepresented in being harassed by police tend to be underrepresented in technology circles.
steelframe
This guy just went to federal prison on a 25-year sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Syonyk
https://www.idoc.idaho.gov/content/prisons/resident-client-s...
Some of his blog posts in the past several months also highlight the dismal state of prison tech, which I suppose is on-point for this thread:
rectang
A lot of immigrants read HN, and immigrants are getting plenty harassed these days.
ljlolel
My friend in tech went to federal prison for years (weed)
s5300
>> average hner ending up in that situation is basically zero.
Techbros do illegal shit all the time
And if you read HN often, there’s plenty of fairly regular high-karma posters that have talked about prison-stints from various issues e.g. mental health, substance abusage leading to (often petty) illegal activity, and extremely illegal business escapades.
Imagine how many HNers would be at meaningful risk of arrest if we got an administration that wanted to crack down on piracy & wanted to make an example out of some otherwise successful people (you make a good salary, why are you engaging in illegal piracy activity?)
Shkreli doesn’t post afaik, but I do know he used to actively lurk. Ask him how butthole elasticity works, and if he expected to find out such things in the manner that he did.
mayo369
Wait a moment, they can't use computer? I remember read some news about prison people become a programmer or something like that...
ddtaylor
Federal versus state(s).
The Federal system is more-or-less standardized and many have access to many things either on campus or remotely.
The State system is a hodge-podge of nonsense and most States are ran like trash for money reasons.
burnt-resistor
Expanding on this: each state is often run by a mix of public and for-profit institutions and services by crooked corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, and so there are often incentives like campaign $upport for politicians to find ways to imprison as many people as possible. In Texas, the facilities are like 19th century penal colonies.
aspenmayer
Prison is like a SCIF you can never leave.
mikeodds
Equally awkward places to have your phone not on silent
burnt-resistor
It's no accident. Maximum cruelty, difficulty, and petty punitiveness are the point because America happily throws away people and doesn't have any concept of reform or reintegration.
hn_throw_250822
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alchemyzach
If prison is going to claim to be rehabilitative then access to word processors, and even some websites (jstor, wikipedia, etc), is a bare minimum requirement imo. Revoke it for bad behavior, sure, but it should otherwise be available several hours per day.
And to all the vindictive sociopath losers out there who want prisons to just inflict max pain all the time - do you not realize improving prison quality of life directly benefits you and could even save your life? Brutalizing a man with harsh conditions, treating him like a wild animal for months/years on end, and then releasing him is just going to make him 5x more angry and dangerous upon release and less likely to assimilate, but now here he comes walking down the same street as you and your loved ones
virtue3
Otherwise they just learn how to be better criminals from other inmates.
Life is really tough on the outside for a lot of prisoners. I’m extremely in favor of helping them lead successful and productive lives on the outside that don’t need to rely on crime.
N_Lens
I would argue that a significant proportion of people are unable to act in their own immediate best interest - they actively make choices that create their misery, sometimes even knowingly punishing themselves.
How much less are they able to make positive choices for remote 'others', especially people they consider bad?
bongodongobob
Oh this is easy.
> Brutalizing a man with harsh conditions, treating him like a wild animal for months/years on end, and then releasing him is just going to make him 5x more angry and dangerous upon release and less likely to assimilate, but now here he comes walking down the same street as you and your loved ones
"Maybe he should have made better choices" they say, as they smugly reference an eye for an eye in their text sent from God.
programjames
I think more realistically, they'll argue if the prison didn't succeed in rehabilitating them, they obviously just need a longer sentence.
mulmen
> Revoke it for bad behavior, sure
Why is this an acceptable form of punishment?
unnamed76ri
This reads like it was written by someone who is developing a Batman villain.
awesome_dude
Because wikipedia is editable by _anyone_ it's probably not the best for prisons - it would provide a means for communication that wasn't able to be monitored.
I mean, if you were in prison and had access to Wikipedia, I could edit, or put something on the talk page, that was a message to you.
You would look up the specific page, and get the message.
stickfigure
There are downloadable, offline versions of wikipedia.
cowcity
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giardini
"...make him 5x more angry and dangerous..."??
Laughable: maybe it's the prison food. But perhaps to be cautious we should increase the gruel and reduce the use of red meat *a la'" Oliver Twist?
Havoc
Why can’t they just change the rules?
At some point surely everyone involved can see it’s just silly
decimalenough
Why would they?
Put yourself in a prison bureaucrat's shoes. There is no upside to changing the rules, easier legal work or whatever for the inmates doesn't affect them (hell, it might even cause more work). But if they do change the rules and something bad happens (like, shock horror, somebody smuggling in a picture of a naked lady), it's their ass on the line for approving it.
BrenBarn
One answer to that is that prison bureaucrats shouldn't be in charge of deciding stuff like this.
moron4hire
The downside for them is more like: prisoners get released earlier, so they don't make their quarterly earnings targets, so that's why their asses are on the line.
zx8080
Seems pretty serious and probably very real KPI. We live in a capitalist society, after all.
Why does the parent get downvoted?
cmeacham98
Most people don't actually believe in rehabilitative justice (they'll say they do, but ask them how they think a rapist should be treated).
Thus, fixing this is not a priority to them, if anything they want it to stay this way.
rectang
Rape is not the only crime people get sent to jail for, and at least some fraction of the US population is capable of seeing the imprisoned as human beings.
I agree nevertheless that inflicting maximum misery and pain on prisoners is popular with a substantial segment of the US electorate, and thus there are negative incentives discouraging even simple fixes like the technology changes wished for in this article.
cmeacham98
Rape is just a useful litmus test, because it triggers the "prisoners are irredeemable and deserve to be treated less than human" emotions in most people who don't support rehabilitative justice.
It's easy to say someone who stole a loaf of bread should be rehabilitated, but when asked about a one-off rapist people will show their true beliefs.
varenc
Changing the rules is definitely more work than maintaining status quo. Imagine a giant bureaucracy and all the things that are would need to adjust. And granting prisoners even limited internet access is fraught.
A close friend of mine taught physics and programming in San Quentin and for the most part his students couldn't use even a restricted variant of the internet. He told me guards would complain that he was "making criminals smarter".
He ended up hosting a local copy of Wikipedia for student use, but to make the prison staff happy he had to remove any controversial articles from it, like "lockpicking" and any article with explicit imagery.
N_Lens
Total global debt is estimated in excess of 100trillion. We have everything we need to thrive, but we're living within a self created system of indenture for most people.
Why don't we just change the rules?
Terr_
> Total global debt is estimated in excess of 100trillion.
That number sounds scary, but ask yourself: Who is the debt owed to? Is it to Galactus, Eater of Worlds, who will devour our planet if we fail to pay? No, the debt is mostly owed to other people who have their own debts. Follow the flows around--instead of summing every step--and you'll see the cycles cancel out.
Imagine three people marooned on an island: They could find a shiny rock, slap a price on it, and sit down in a circle, lending it around clockwise until the Total Islandwide Debt reaches $300 trillion, where each resident has $100t in debt (to the person on their right) and $100t in credit (to the person on their left.)
Have these three castaways doomed civilization or enslaved the masses? Will countries deliberately not-rescue them to prevent an economic crisis? Nah.
TLDR: "Total" debt is not a very meaningful statistic.
650REDHAIR
Because changing the rules makes you look “soft on crime”.
There’s no incentive to fix the broken system(s).
AngryData
Sure they could, but who with that capability has a reason to care? To the jail a bad court result from inmates means nothing to them and might even help them maintain prison capacity and politicians don't care because most of the people will never be allowed to vote again.
bsenftner
The courts were weaponized well over a decade ago, by the political party system. It's now a drawn out media fight where no matter what the public loses.
buckle8017
because they don't trust inmates with computers and they also don't trust their lawyers
buckle8017
Sounds like your lawyer messed up not sending paper copies.
Good thing he saved the $10.
bdangubic
Paper copies?????! What is this, 1999 :-) Many (many, many…) Courts have been fully paperless for years
umanwizard
Sure, but what stops the lawyer from printing out the PDFs?
awesome_dude
Have you SEEN the price of ink????
buckle8017
ok but the jail is not and he would have gotten the paper copies right away
quietthrow
Aren’t prisons a business run by corporations? And I could be wrong but I recall reading somewhere a while ago that 1 or 2 companies run most of the prisons in USA. As such they probably have no need / incentives driven by market forces to modernize. It’s not exactly a market to begin with in the first place I would say.
bdcravens
There are some private prisons, but overwhelmingly most are run by the state or federal government. However, that makes what you say even more true; they aren't driven by competitive market forces. Of course, many things aren't, and presumably that's the role of government regulations, to protect the public interests and fulfill the social contract. (Whether it does or doesn't is larger topic, and not something I'm trying to address in this comment)
cmeacham98
New Jersey State Prison is, as the name implies, a state-run prison.
ronsor
Most people are not in private prisons (< 10% [0]), even if there shouldn't be any at all. Of course, there are still many "contractors" and "vendors" (phone service providers, food vendors, etc.) in public prisons which grift everyone.
[0] https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
monkeyelite
Public is when the government holds the wallet and pays vendors. Private is when they give a wallet to someone else to pay the vendors.
poslathian
After becoming familiar with the reality of the cost inflation of (in my case local government real estate) development projects vs private I chalked it up to graft, incentives, and mismanagement.
Actually your comment is probably more correct - adds a whole step to move the wallet. Misaligned incentives and mismanagement are probably more equal across public/private than we like to believe
bdcravens
Who signs the paycheck of the warden and the officers is another way to differentiate.
jrm4
The answer to this question is technically no but practically yes.
I never understood why prisoners shouldn't at least have read-only access to the internet.
This is going to become a bigger issue as more and more people think and understand the world through Google searches and LLMs. One reason people who post bail end up with vastly better outcomes in court is because they can prepare for their cases so much better than those stuck in jail waiting for trial.