Should Inmates Have Access to Social Media?
Questions abound about the effects popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have on our daily lives, careers and even humanity. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has said, “connectivity is a human right.” Questions researcher Dave Maass has been looking into in his work on social media in prisons include disparities in inmate access, what control they should have over their own accounts, and how social media usage is punished. Ally Bauer reports.
From Myspace on Death Row to Alabama Legislation
Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, says he first became interested in the topic of inmates using social media when he discovered that many inmates on death row had Myspace pages. Myspace, before it became a punchline for embarrassing content, was the largest social networking site in the world from 2005 to 2009. Now, the issue of inmates accessing social media has shifted to platforms such as Facebook.
In Alabama, Maass pointed out it is illegal for inmates to have any form of social media. According to the Alabama Department of Corrections website, “Such accounts are a security violation. When they are discovered, ADOC immediately makes a request to the pertinent social networking site to shut the account down and takes appropriate internal actions.”
Whether it is being run by the inmate or a family member on the outside, social media offenses can add time to sentences and/or harsher conditions for the incarcerated.
The legislation outlawing inmate social media in state prisons and city and county jails was passed in Alabama in 2013. Under the law, those on the outside who help inmates establish an Internet presence are subject to a $500 fine.
“I think the Alabama law is unconstitutional,” Maass said. “Inmates are not even allowed to have somebody operating email accounts on their behalf in Alabama. And then anybody who actually works in conjunction with somebody who is in a state prison, to post something to the Internet is actually guilty of a misdemeanor. So this is a serious, constitutional censorship issue in Alabama.”
Caught Between Facebook and Prison Rules
Maass believes a government agency which comes up with such policies does not think it through. He said another unsolved question is “what happens to inmates in Alabama who had social media before incarceration?”
Some inmate social media pages are not being updated by the inmate but by someone outside of prison. This creates problems for Facebook which has issues with profiles being run by other people than the person whose account it is, but Maass said the social media giant does not care how inmates are accessing their profiles as long as they are doing it directly.
Meanwhile, he says, prisons care mostly about how the inmates are accessing Facebook, such as through contraband phones. It is hard for prisons to determine who is posting though, so many inmates get punished whether it really is them or someone else posting on their accounts.
States which have had some of the harshest policies against social media usage by inmates in recent years include Texas, which has the largest state prison system, New Mexico, South Carolina, Georgia and Indiana.
From Backlash to Breaking Rules and Victories
Maass says he has run into backlash for working on this issue, but says he “avoids the comment sections” in articles he writes.
The researcher says he had many challenges in obtaining answers to his many questions and admitted to being unaware he was maybe using illegal methods at first.
“I wasn’t sure how the system worked and I may have broken prison rules just by not being fully cognizant of it,” he said. Maass gives the example of prisoners having a specific call list and having one of them adding him to phone conversations via conference call, which was not allowed.
So should inmates have access to social media whatever the circumstances? Maass did not have a direct answer to this question, but believes it should not be so hard or expensive for inmates to interact more fully with the outside world using some social media because he said “society is not just email anymore.” He also said since Donald Trump’s election, his attention has mostly shifted to other topics but that he still wants to look into inmates and social media.
One “victory” he wrote about here was when Facebook, after pressure from Maass and others, changed its procedures to take down an inmate account.
Another recent victory Maass wrote about in this October 2018 article, was a new California law, A.B. 2448, which requires that youths in juvenile detention be granted access to the Internet for educational purposes.
“I think that certainly with juveniles, it should not be punitive at all,” he said during the Reynolds Media Lab organized press conference. “That is not the purpose of juvenile detention. It should be about what can we do to make sure that this person is able to recover from whatever happened to them… I would like to see prisons focused on rehabilitation, ensuring that there is both safety but also some sort of quality of life for the people who are incarcerated.”
To Maass, that includes some levels of access to social media.
For more ideas from Maass on this often ignored issue, here’s an article titled: What If MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Had Been a Facebook Post?https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/what-if-mlks-letter-birmingham-city-jail-had-been-facebook-post
Here’s another article by Maass titled: New Mexico Inmate Faces 90 Days in Solitary Confinement Over a Facebook Profile
