Iowa Prison to Grant Email Privileges to Inmates

The inmates of Mitchellville State Women’s Prison are in for a treat. Iowa’s Department of Corrections recently launched a project that allows them to correspond with their friends and family via email. No, they will not be given Macbooks or BlackBerry devices. The new project only allows the inmates to receive email messages, not send them.

Receiving email messages

Because a set of computer work stations with highly secured software is yet to be installed in the correctional facility, the email privilege given to the inmates will only be one-way. Although they have to deal with the fact that they can only receive and not send any email messages to their friends and loved ones for now, the inmates in Mitchellville may be granted additional email privileges in the future. After all, the creative team from Advanced Technologies Group of West Des Moines is currently working on a new system that will allow the inmates to not only receive and read but compose and send emails as well.

If the new system fails to develop, the Iowa-based firm already has an alternative method in mind. According to chief executive officer Atul Gupta, the inmates may just write their messages on bar-coded papers that will be scanned before they are forwarded to their respective recipients via email.

Screening incoming messages

To ensure that each email is in compliance with the security requirements of the correctional, the prison officials will screen all incoming messages via a computer. After checking the content of the emails, the prison officials will then print a copy of each email and deliver them personally to the inmates. The Mitchellville inmates, therefore, will only read their email messages from a printout and not a computer.