Fascinating new Slate series on "how technology is changing prison as we know it"

This week I came across this notable new series of articles at Slate titled "Time, Online: How technology is changing prison as we know it."  The series as of this writing has nine extended pieces by an array of authors covering topics at the intersection of modern technology and modern prison.  I have only started reading a few of the piece, and they are all really interesting.   This piece by Mia Armstrong-Lopez serves as an introduction under this full title: "For Years, Prison Life Was Isolated From Tech. Now Tech Is Beginning to Define It: Introducing Time, Online, a new Future Tense package that explores how technology is changing prison as we know it." Here is an excerpt from that piece (with links from the original):

Around 1.9 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, and an estimated 45 percent of Americans have at some point experienced the incarceration of an immediate family member.  (For Black Americans, that number increases to 63 percent.)  For many years, prisons have largely been tech bunkers, keeping incarcerated people isolated from the world outside.  But things have started to change.  In some cases, they changed because prison leaders recognized the need to connect incarcerated people to their communities. In other cases, they changed because, in relationship with private companies, prisons found a way to profit.

The pandemic accelerated this trend. Activities like visitation and education programs were paused and in many cases replaced by video calls, e-messaging, and other virtual activities, facilitated in part by glitchy, specially made tablets distributed by private companies.  As a result, things like tablets and e-messaging — which may seem trivial to those of us on the outside but can be transformational on the inside — are now popular in prisons and jails across the country. Instead of being isolated from technology, big parts of incarcerated people’s lives are now being mediated through it.

Time, Online, a new package from Future Tense, attempts to document this moment.  Through a series of essays that were (with one exception) written by currently and formerly incarcerated people, we’ll examine how tech is changing what it means to be in prison.  We’ll explore what happens when streaming comes to prison and how e-messaging is affecting romantic relationships.  We’ll look at how incarcerated people are finding ways to jailbreak tablets and how you Google from the inside.  We’ll look at what it’s like to wear an ankle monitor and to get access to a laptop after 17 years in prison.  We’ll share diaries that document how incarcerated people interact with tech hour by hour, in three different state prison systems, and how much it costs.  And we’ll dig into the who’s who of prison tech companies and the powerful financial forces behind them.