Last year, Dave Maass, an investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, found a document on the website of the South Carolina Department of Corrections that listed nearly 400 inmates in the state’s prisons who had broken a rule against posting on social-media sites. Prisons often bar inmates from Facebook, Twitter and other sites, citing a concern that they could use social media to plan contraband drops or intimidate witnesses — and also because their presence online is evidence that they’re using contraband cellphones, since prisoners generally lack Internet access through other means.
But in South Carolina, Maass discovered, the punishments meted out for posting online were surprisingly harsh. In October 2013, for example, Tyheem Henry received a penalty of 37½ years in solitary confinement, for posting on Facebook on 38 different days. When Maass looked into the issue, he found that the agency was sending inmates caught posting on social-media sites to solitary confinement for an average of 512 days.
Maass’s findings, which he posted online last week, got lots of media attention. It’s easy to see why: Sending people to solitary for years for updating their Facebook profiles sounds like the definition of draconian. But in fact, this is just a symptom of a much larger problem. Solitary — in theory, a punishment for the worst of the worst, inmates who pose an immediate threat to others — has become a routine disciplinary tool, used in ways for which it was never intended. The good news is that this is beginning to change — even, it turns out, in South Carolina.
[For more of this story, written by Emily Bazelon, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02...onfinement.html?_r=0]
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