Today I read in the New York Times that 1 in 100 American adults is in prison.  This is the highest incarceration rate in America's history and I believe it is also one of the highest in the world.  This is really shameful, not to mention horrible social policy, given what we know about high recidivism rates and the crimilnalizing effects of being in jail.

Because of the way my mind works, I am always wondering if there is grassroots digital solution to any problem and I am wondering if having inmates blog might be a good idea. 

Certainly this wouldn't be for everyone.  Some prisoners really are dangerous and blogging would give them an opportuniy to promote illegal activities.  But I feel that a lot of inmates, particularly those arrested using mandatory minimums for drug offenses, really aren't bad people, they are just caught in a cycle of low economic opportunity and crime. 

I doubt that inmates currently have the ability to blog from jail, so I think this is a job for inmate-rights groups.  They should select the most sympathetic and unjustly-sentenced inmates and have them write out posts in longhand about their life behind bars and then the NGO can type and post what they write onto a blog.  This was how jailed Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah blogged from jail and it worked for him.  If prison blogging worked in Egypt, it can work in the US too.

For inamtes who are not an immediate threat to those around them, prison is a means for society to forget about the people it has failed.  By putting their stories on the internet, blogging makes these invisible people visible again and forces us to address the disfunction in our society that causes us to incarcerate so many of our fellow citizens.