OTM: How Prisoners Get Punished When Their Families Post Online

In the episode of On The Media titled "Do Better" a segment within that episode has been titled "How Prisoners Get Punished When Their Families Post Online". In this segment Bob Garfield interviews Dave Maass. Dave is a investigative researcher and has studied this issue for some time for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF is an organization that looks to protect civil liberties in the digital world (1). Dave states that he isn't a lawyer but classifies himself as a "muckracker". He studies and digs up dirt on several issues and uses activism to get different policies that have been passed to be reversed. The issue is that Texas has recently joined South Carolina, New Mexico, and Maine by creating policies that does not allow inmates, their families or any other third party to post on their behalf on social media. The prisons will look at social media platforms to see if any posts are made on an inmates profile and will try to link it to the the actual inmate in prison and will punish them for that behavior. In South Carolina they use to give a Level 1 offense for this activity which is the same level for escapes, rapes, assaults and others. For committing this action they can be put into solitary confinement or can lose telephone privileges. They do this to censor the inmate as well as censoring the outside to know what it is really like in prison and the conditions the inmates live in (2). This was an interesting topic after recently talking in my social media class about the prison system and the flaws within it.This was quite eye-opening to me.

I believe that when you commit a crime and have been sentenced to go to prison that you lose some of your freedom and in a sense lose some rights because of your wrongdoings to society. In this case it is about their first amendment right of free speech. I believe that since they have been convicted of a crime their right to the first amendment can be limited. To punish them for a family member posting on their page is a bit much. In the interview Dave mentions that they don't use the modern technology of what IP address was used to access these platforms. The forum created to monitor their social media accounts merely look and see that there has been content posted and will try to link it to the inmate to then in return punish them. I believe the forum that looks into these social media accounts need to look more into the records of where the login occurred and take a deeper look into it before punishing an inmate. I hope that the EFF will find alternate ways to monitor this and eventually come to a compromise with these forums to be more accurate in if there was collaborations or not and reduce the number of punishments handed out for this.


1. Electronic Frontier Foundation

2. How Prisoners Get Punished When Their Families Post Online