In the December-January 1997 issue of CMR, I devoted my column to the topic of "Prisoners on the Internet." The column, which is available on the internet at the Corrections Telecommunication and Technology Website examined potential security problems, but it also explored the possible benefits on a firewalled intranet for within-prison communications between prisoners and staff. Innovation on the internet is rapid, and prisoner involvement has taken several new forms that correctional managers should be aware of.

Prisoner Pen Pals

Community organizations have traditionally encouraged letter-writing between volunteers and prisoners. However, with the advent of the internet, letter-writing programs have taken a new form. Web sites offer to match prisoners and interested persons. A current list of such sites is maintained by Yahoo at www.cyberspace-inmates.com/ is operated by a minister who states "I would like you to know I work at this full time ten hours a day seven days a week. I enjoy this more than anything I have ever done in my life. Thank you for making my site a success."

Other sites are commercial. For example, www.prisonpenpals.com/ charges $14.95 per year for a basic web page devoted to a particular prisoner, dedicated to generating mail to the prisoner. The site has a sophisticated search engine that allows the user to search for prisoners by state, race, age, gender, expected release date, conviction offence, and topics of interest.

Another section of the site, called "Strictly Business" sells newsletter ads related to prisoner businesses. The site advises that no new pages are being accepted because prisons have not been allowing prisoners to operate personal businesses. However, prisoners can be very creative and I would expect that this decision by this site operator will not terminate the businesses. The following are some examples of the businesses advertised on the site.

• One prisoner charges $1.35 for a fudge recipe that uses ingredients typically sold in a prison commissary and that does not require cooking.

• Another prisoner charges $5.00 for a retirement investment plan. (No, the prisoner does not suggest a life sentence as a viable retirement plan!)

• Another site charges $5.00 for the "American Department of Education" child discipline kit.

• One creative prisoner offers poetry at $3.00 per poem. His personal and presumably financial objective is to produce 5,000 poems.

Prisonpenpals.com: Some sites offer the possibility of communicating with a prisoner email forwarded through paper mail. The email addresses are managed by the operator of the web site, and the content is mailed to the prisoner on paper. Several sites reported that they had suspended this service because prisons limited the practice, but other sites continue to offer the service.

Some web sites focus on particular groups of prisoners based on ethnicity or legal status. For example, Native Prisoners focuses on native prisoners, and other sites focus on prisoners on death row, etc. One site called Love-Penn at www.love-penn.com focuses on relationships, and the prisoners sometimes make salacious pitches, such as offering to "fulfill every desire." Another site at www.streetgangs.com/ includes a penpal section providing access to prisoners with gang backgrounds. At Links Toward Abolition you can download and view a Realaudio and VDOLive interview with a death-row prisoner.

The Post Office has issued an advisory on this subject, posted on the web at Prison Penpals AdvisoryThe Post Office advisory recognizes that some prisoners may have legitimate intentions in seeking letter-writing relationships. The primary concern of the USPS is money order fraud, where a prisoner uses the relationship to persuade a penpal to cash a fraudulent check and send the cash to an accomplice.

For many decades, correctional managers have had to balance the constructive and illegitimate purposes of prisoner visitation and letter-writing. Therefore this is not a new problem, rather it is an old problem that surfaces in a new form. There are practical and legal limitations on what a prison or jail can or should do about these programs, because some of their purposes are legitimate, and because they are operated by non-prisoners who are not directly subject to prison regulation. However, a basic strategy should involve being aware of what is taking place on the internet. Many of these sites provide for a search by jurisdiction, so that a prison system can get a listing of each of the prisoners involved by simply searching by state.

The internet makes it possible to many activities to take place without regard to time and space. A common example is distance learning, where a student or trainee can participate in a course of study without being in a classroom with the instructor. Since the basic concept of imprisonment involves time-and-space separation of a person from society, the internet offers a range of new opportunities for prisoners to overcome the boundaries of their confinement. The challeng for correctional administrators will be to facilitate positive opportunities while detecting and limiting dangerous and illegal activities.