I think this...ANY...effort to bring modern IT services to inmates/convicts is terribly overdue and applaud this effort with all my heart. Convicts (their preferred label, not mine) are treated worse than animals in many cases.
I spent 22.5 months in the Florida DOC system, and did hard time with the nastiest of them. I built out a simple single-user DB (using Access, what else?) system for the law library at Gulf CI in the panhandle that allowed lightning-fast referencing of case law and cites.
This was 11 years ago, and IT and web interest was big, but nowhere near where it is now, so I was amazed at the interest so many fellow convicts had in my work, and I tried my best to teach every single one of them what I knew and to maintain and extend my work.
It truly felt like God's work at the time.
A lot of "lifers" (people with life sentences, with no apparent chance of release) hung out in the law library, working on their cases for years, and these peoples were so grateful for the work I did...the common refrain was "no one will ever work as hard as you can when it comes to your freedom", and almost all this law library crowd knew way more about the legal system than the highest paid lawyers I've known and used.
They were hackers in the truest sense of the word.
Sometimes, it was hard to reconcile the charges I saw with the people I lived and worked with, I'll be honest, but as I used to say, one or two (really) bad hours/days do not always make a person "bad".
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I spent 22.5 months in the Florida DOC system, and did hard time with the nastiest of them. I built out a simple single-user DB (using Access, what else?) system for the law library at Gulf CI in the panhandle that allowed lightning-fast referencing of case law and cites.
This was 11 years ago, and IT and web interest was big, but nowhere near where it is now, so I was amazed at the interest so many fellow convicts had in my work, and I tried my best to teach every single one of them what I knew and to maintain and extend my work.
It truly felt like God's work at the time.
A lot of "lifers" (people with life sentences, with no apparent chance of release) hung out in the law library, working on their cases for years, and these peoples were so grateful for the work I did...the common refrain was "no one will ever work as hard as you can when it comes to your freedom", and almost all this law library crowd knew way more about the legal system than the highest paid lawyers I've known and used.
They were hackers in the truest sense of the word.
Sometimes, it was hard to reconcile the charges I saw with the people I lived and worked with, I'll be honest, but as I used to say, one or two (really) bad hours/days do not always make a person "bad".
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