Internet for Incarcerated Persons Vital to Success on the Outside

In a recent editorial opinion in Wired Magazine, Luke Elliott Sommer explains how access to internet services while incarcerated is vital to success on community re-entry and helping to reduce recidivism overall. Sommer is a former US Army Ranger who is incarcerated because of a PTSD-related event and is housed at USP Coleman II in Wildwood, Florida.

Generally, updated technology services are difficult to access in carceral facilities. For security purposes, access needs to be tightly controlled and, considering the background of some incarerated people, there's many good reasons for that control. But rather than invest in that infrastructure that we on the outside world understand to be a vital component of day to day life, carceral facilities most often opt for no viable, modern internet solution whatsoever.

Cutting prisoners off from technology not only hampers their ability to maintain regular family contact, but they're also missing out on the technology advances that help the rest of us stay updated in our jobs and communities as a whole. Spending any significant time incarcerated and not having knowledge of those advancements adds another road block for potential job opportunities when prisoners finish their sentences and attempt to successfully re-enter their communities.

Excerpts from the editorial:

I've been in federal prison for 17 years. During that time, I have watched flip phones become iPhones, EVs become ubiquitous, and AI start to take over the world—albeit not quite the way Terminator envisioned it (yet). Still, I have been largely unable to use that technology myself. I could only read about it in magazines and newspapers, watching the 21st century unfold using 17th-century methods. I didn’t physically hold a smart device until the US Federal Bureau of Prisons started selling tablets—last year.

It’s hard to be disconnected from loved ones and the outside world in this way. But cutting prisoners off from technology is more broadly disadvantageous to them and to society than you might realize. If I were released tomorrow and had served only two years, I would still be stepping into a world that contains many new and unfamiliar technologies, like generative AI. And I haven’t served two years. I have served 17 and am not scheduled to get out for another 11. Without access to technology and adequate training, when I do leave I will be entering a society that is unrecognizably different from the one I left. Over 20 years in prison will have done nothing to prepare me for the seismic shifts that have occurred. And that needs to change.

You can read the rest of the editorial titled "Inmates Need Internet to Prepare for Life After Prison" by Luke Elliott Sommer at Wired.com.