Between the Bars/About

"Between the Bars" is a weblog platform for prisoners. Despite having the world's largest per-capita prison population (and growing), American prisoners are routinely denied access to the Internet. While prisoners can communicate with friends and families through paper mail, they have little access to broadcast media of any type. Between the Bars is an effort to bridge this gap by allowing prisoners to blog, giving them a voice, a platform to tell their stories, and an opportunity to build and maintain positive social relationships while in prison. Prisoners typically do not have Internet access, but they can write posts in paper letters, which we subsequently scan and post to the Internet. Transcriptions of the letters are crowd-sourced from site visitors, and visitors' comments and responses to the posts can be mailed back to the prisoners. We currently are developing a technology prototype of the website and process, which is expected to be fully operational by late March. We will then begin an initial roll-out in local prisons around Massachusetts starting in April. After analysis and design iteration, we hope to open the platform to prisoners everywhere by the end of 2009.

Knight Questions
1) What is this tool (software, hardware, a way of using technology differently in order to accomplish X)?

This tool is a blogging system that makes it easy to blog on paper, using standard postal mail. It consists of software tools to make it easy to upload PDF scans of letters, crowd-sourced transcriptions of the scanned images, and the usual full-featured blogging tools including comments, tagging, RSS feeds, and notifications for friends and family when new posts are available.

2)  What might communities want to use it for?

We are designing this system for prisoners in the US, a growing population that is routinely denied access to broadcast media. We hope that prisoners will be able to use this platform to tell their stories, to maintain social connections to the outside world, and to retain a sense of identity and humanity through the process of their incarceration.

3)  Is it ready for communities to use? At what stage of development is it?

The system is in very early alpha stages, it is not yet ready for use by the general public. The development code is running on a local server, but many features have not yet been implemented.

What are the next stages of development and when do you anticipate completing those stages?

Next steps include:
 * finish the core functionality of the code and to improve the visual presentation of the site (expected to be accomplished within a month)
 * Network with local prisoner support organizations who can help evaluate the design and connect us to initial users (expected to be accomplished within 6 months)
 * Bring the site live to the general public (expected by year's end).

4)  Has it been tested in a community? Where, exactly, and what was learned?

It has not yet been tested.

5)  How can people get started adapting this tool to their own communities?

Source code will be freely available in a public repository, as well as documentation on how to use the code.

6)  Whom can they approach for more information about this tool?

Charlie DeTar cfd@media.mit.edu

Benjamin Mako Hill mako@media.mit.edu