"Of course, this access depends on two factors: an inmate’s ability to purchase such a tablet, which costs $147"

Just found a used Kindle for $19.99 on ebay.

@1: That's one, count 'em, ONE Kindle on ebay.What about all the other prisoners? And how, pray tell, are prisoners supposed to buy things on ebay in the first fucking place? The only exaggeration taking place in your comment is your assessment of your own intelligence.

Trump administration?

@1 Prisoners can't get books but you think they can get Kindles? You clearly don't understand how prisons work. I'm sure the $147 is for the standard prison-issue tablet.

We need wholesale prison reform. We're still running a punitive system without any observable benefit to society.

@3 Trump's prison reform bonafides are more solid than most democrats, ironically. (Apparently this is a result of Kim Kardashian, but whatever)

@4 prices in prisons are extortionate. https://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/nym/NYM_CommList.pdf - also bear in mind that prison labor pays significantly less than minimum wage and is effectively compulsory.

We like to kick people when they are down in this society.

@6 Extortionate? Been to an airport recently?

"We're still running a punitive system without any observable benefit to society."

Crime is at 50 year lows.

@8 Yes. I've also left a lot of airports recently, usually with an hour or two of arriving.

@10 Amazing where a crime-free life can take you.

Lucky the war in crime seems to be working with crime in the US at 50 year lows, eh?

@1 - I was volunteering for BTP when the thing with Pennsylvania happened. It’s more complicated than that. The prisoners were going to be required to purchase the kindle from a contracted vendor, and the set price was $147 per prisoner. Thanks for assuming Michelle didn’t know what she was talking about though??!? You’d do well to consider that she is intimately familiar with the details (you have to be if you plan to wrangle these beaurocratic methods), and you are not.

This is just fucking stupid and horrible. Having free and easy access to books is incredibly important. Also, Germansausage won't be able to get his hands on Mein Kampf when he eventually snaps.

It's not just books, also in PA inmates can't receive actual mail. Mail is computer scanned and then they're shown images of the birthday card their kid sent them etc.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/pennsylvania-prison-scanned-mail-smart-communications.html

Given America's peculiar addiction to criminalizing and imprisoning it's citizens for poverty and the lifestyle choices of marginalized populations they don't approve of, I'm baffled by how many citizens think prisons are simply an extension of Club Med.
It's much easier for me to understand the sick motives of the many rent seekers who's entire business model depends on exploiting the families of the incarcerated. I say families, because it's typically the poor women and family members forced to pick up the tab for America's lucrative prison money extraction system built around the incarcerated.
For those unfamiliar, prison's run a monopoly on everything from phone service and low quality commissary items to things like mail and education. A prisoner does not do anything in a prison without going through a prison approved highly lucrative single vendor system that charges exorbitant amounts for services and products that are both inferior to and far more expensive than the public would pay of the same item. Just one more reason so many leave the prison system bitter about a society built upon their exploitation.
As we witnessed in Pennsylvania and other states around the country that have pulled this came scam, those who profit off the imprisoned see this free book program as a direct threat to their lucrative book monopoly to charge exorbitant fees for books.
For the uninformed, there is no "open internet" in prison's to download free books. There is no Amazon or Costco to choose the reading device you want.
You are instead required to over-pay for a crappy, low quality stripped down device that no free person would take for free, let alone pay $179 for. You are charged high fees for book downloads that you could obtain for free if not in prison. In Pennsylvania and other States that have run this scam, once they banned private book donations, they immediately offered prisoners these same books through their single vendor that charged 300% to 400% more than a non-prisoner would pay for the same book in a book store.
While I don't imagine anyone serious who has studies the data believes that prison either reduces/prevents crime, or does anything more than ensures a steady supply of re-offenders to feed the for profit carceral system to fill the gap slavery left behind, let's be honest and admit this is yet another money making scheme by our prison system to exploit and extract as much money as possible from the most impoverished among us.

@16 And yet crime rates in the US are at the lowest point in 50 years, and continue to drop!

You don’t think that has anything to do with the fact that the criminals are in jail?

@17: You are not responding to what Aurellaur is saying.

Check in with Jay on the campaign trail. He can fix this.

Hey Nathalie,

Your article mentions a ban on "used publications" and mentions that it is for security reasons.

Why did you not get a quote from DOC regarding the security concerns associated with new publications? Also can you check with Books for Prisoners and see how many new versus used publications they send to prisoners?

@17, you're way off topic from both the article and my comment, but since you raise the fallacy that mass incarceration has made America safer I will address your comment.
The argument that mass incarceration makes us safer is a myth primarily perpetuated by law enforcement in their endless attempt to apply the failed broken window theory to shift the blame for structural problems within policing itself to the general public, poor minorities in particular.
Law enforcement constantly demands more money and ever greater surveillance powers by endlessly working to scare and threaten their fellow America that Seattle would be a post apocalyptic Mogadishu unless we are willing to give them an endless money supply and remove what remains of that Bill of Rights they claim only protects monsters. It's the same schtick every authoritarian government from Nazi Germany to Stalin's USSR used to control the population through fear and panic. Ensure you always have some false boogieman to perpetuate endless fear (the communists, Day-care sex-abuse hysteria, war on terror, sex trafficking moral panic) so they can strip citizens of their few rights as the constantly claim monsters are running a-mock and suspending the Constitution is the only way to stop them. Law enforcement wants the public so frightened of the mythical "monster hiding behind every bush" that they will eventually thank them for using state violence as a tool of social control rather than the real crimes the public actually cares about.
I suggest you read "The end of Policing" by Alex Vitale. He shows clearly through the data that despite drastically falling violent crime rates among an aging American public, law enforcement has managed to continually increase the prison population over the past 30 years by incarcerating an ever growing percentage of the population for dumb, victimless lifestyle crimes. When it comes to addressing actual violent crime (rape, murder, assault, armed theft) the clearance rates by the police for these crimes are not only abysmal (well below 40%) but continue to fall as police increasingly focus their attention on the low hanging easy arrests no one really cares about. Anecdotally, you will find when victims of real violent crime call the police they are generally met with ambivalence and a general lack of interest.
Realizing the public would see their focus away from violent crime as an enormous waste of resources, they work closely with local media to recast low level crimes that are the equivalent of fishing without a license as a major violent crime spree that threatens the very fabric of society. The media gets their click bait dollars from Google and the police get to pretend like they are doing more good than harm. They're the perfect bed fellows.