Ask HN: Prisoners Not Allowed to Study Programming?

Seems obvious everyone here will agree with you. Question is how to create the change needed.

If you believe prison is for "punishment" and that prisoners are "fundamentally bad" then the answer is no - don't let them do anything that could improve their lives. However, if you believe prison is for "rehabilitation" and that "people can change" then exposure to current tech, within reason, would be good thing. I vote for the latter, mainly because almost everyone who goes in comes out.

And now for the off-the-rails part of my answer... maybe we could limit prisoners to outdated technology - they might end up with decent jobs maintaining old mainframes or Cobol or Fortran - somebody is going to have to do it and a lot of the old school guys are retiring.

First off, that sucks for your friend. I would hope they would be able to learn programming. I think the policy should be changed, but I'm also not even sure if it's a policy, or if different prisons get to make those decisions.

I think one of the logistical issues is I'm not sure prisoners have great internet access, in terms of either time, size of things downloaded, or having a persistent space to store their own data, if it's on a public computer. I'm not sure for example if they are allowed a laptop in their cell, or something like that. Probably not?

Makes me wonder if there's a way to compile resources on a USB drive that would have the software required, and the books / knowledge, without necessarily accessing the internet, and a place to store files on. Kind of like a class on a stick.

The stereotype of SW engineers is that we are asocial, as in socially inept, but antisocial (as in breaking the rules of society) AFAIK we are not, if anything the stereotype is the opposite, we are seen as tranquil calm persons (even shy) respecting the laws around us.

I teach a programming course at my local jail, so there are institutions that allow it. In my experience, the jail prefers if the books come straight from Amazon or other known companies, so you might want to try that.

>Should this policy be changed?

Absolutely. But I have a question, is this US specific, or could we expect every prisoner around the world not be able to learn programming?

I have sent friends who were incarcerated (Texas prison system) programming books; I haven't had the same experience. With most issues in the prison, there's a lot of subjective judgment, often by lower paid employees without much training or experience. Your best bet is to contact the prison's office and ask to discuss the issue with someone at the major or warden level.

In my CS major, continuous math, discrete math, graph theory, probability and statistics, linear algebra etc. were prerequisites to other courses. So see if those books are blocked as a "threat to order".

If those get through and he reads through them, try sending things like "An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata", "A First Course in Combinatorial Optimization" and this sort of thing.

There are also prison reform groups like FAMM that you can talk to.

JQuery has been solidified as a choice paradigm for instituting racism and that might make it easy to locate a problematic person as far as like using one computer to ring up another goes. This is weird sure but groups of kids grow into these modes and we just rear on them instead. Similarly, that there are no children in prisons means the answer and release system, for info, is a lot more like military intelligence. If you occupy the mind with tasks, generally, you can obscure realities through the use of weak typing and strong typing systems that will spend the vision on introductory concepts rather than entangling the premise with a mode for learning the subsystem as we engineers do (cough). Having said that inmates arent reliably coherent enough without a sense of lawyer tandem incognito kind of pursuits because the authority they've defined out of the law has a precedence of criminal law rather than terminal law. It has a medium. Where there is crime, there is money and opportunity for it. If none then the threat is an obscure one to do with privatization practices and the order of conduct is no longer a legend. The legend is dead. It's a meter and that person gauging the situation simply isnt trained. Class action will open but not secure. The extent of the router or modem, like the extension of discussion, must be that modicums exist for situating a parent's rights into the situation without surmounting for evidence that the parent's programming is what indeed accounts for ascertaining parameters in the user's locale, physical/aperture/hex, so that all interactions are modeled prior and not made an esssential discussion in their rehabilitation. Children forego these habits of new naturally occuring phenomenon but soldiers and inmates have no quarter for that. This is essential but that prison might just be getting underminded by the catholic religions, the bible belt and several ranger launches over the police forces in their vicinities to get a leg in on the new program. It's illegal we arent allowed to discuss this openly but that when we do it comes up another way means that that part of the law is covered to exceed any relationships these potentials may have but since there is no particular prison there is no real threat in this discussion. The fight though is a long shot. There are only so many inmates with the right language learning tools and so that may make the situation more bleak when students start to compete on levies for a stack that doesn't exist and a daemon got stabbed in the showers for selling black child porn instead of white child porn, at least in the showers. If you know what I mean.

What we then include languages for a medium is the sense that we integrate but the practice is one of truth telling. If you know what I mean.

I think perhaps it might just mean that the source isn't reliable because they may have the same books in the library but they haven't been read and most of the laws requiring donations to be assembled require that the books be burned or washed if they aren't used solely by prisoners because of the use of pesticides in them that may contain chemicals that inmates can use for smoking whatever chemical things they have around as like a way to say we know how meth is made but you dont seem to think that's just fire. But that isn't here or there that they sdll drugs and this may introduce a placable risk setting for them to introduce that weed isn't killing your brain cells, as the single cells in a human, but rather that it makes the cels in a sect of opportunity not care as much and that makes criminals want to do more work for themselves, including killing time for them (in prison kekeke) and maybe making money using drugs as well as selling them, when the situation arises that the women in the situation were using the good book to hide that they don't use papers to smoke. They use it to hide their breath. Because they are prostitutes. There are no prostitutes in prison. Those are victims...

I think you have the situation wrong.

Federal bureau of prisons will not let you mail books on any subject to inmates unless directly from the publisher. Did you buy the books new from Amazon shipped direct? That’s pretty much the only way they get the books.

Imagine the number of steel files tucked in the spines or hollowed-out pages, and LSD-soaked paper they’d have to deal with.

I would have amazon send the books again, or another title on the same subject. Chances are some new B.O.P. employee was heavy handed based on an ignorant assumption.

> Should this policy be changed?

The policy you have inferred from this single rejection does not appear to formally exist, so asking if it should be changed may be premature.