You've got jail: Is it time to bring America's prisoners online?

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

IN DECEMBER 2010, a local Fox News affiliate broke the news that a heavily tattooed Oklahoma man had been posting candid photos of himself on Facebook. In one, he was dreamily licking an extremely lethal-looking knife. In another, he was showing off a bong made out of toilet paper rolls. In other words, pretty standard Facebook imagery, except that the man was a convicted murderer serving time in Oklahoma's Granite Reformatory, posting the photos from his jail cell using a contraband smartphone.

In January 2011, The New York Times wrote about an incarcerated counterfeiter in Florida who was paying his debt to society by playing Farmville and Street Wars. A few months later, the Los Angeles Times reported that in California, a one-day test of a proposed system that can ferret out contraband phones intercepted more than 4,000 attempted calls, text messages, and efforts to access the Internet--all from a single prison. According to a press release issued by the bipartisan National Governors Association, prison inmates use cell phones to "engineer escapes, organize gang activity, threaten and kill witnesses, extort money and commit fraud, organize drug deals and riots, track the location of prison guards, and facilitate the trafficking of other contraband."

Like everyone else these days, prisoners are hungry for social connectivity, information, and a chance to prove their prowess at raising imaginary tomatoes. Contraband cellphones--often smuggled in by prison employees--reportedly go for as much as $1,000 apiece precisely because correctional facilities are such information-poor environments. Maybe we should be offering easier, legal ways for inmates to obtain information and communicate with the outside world. That would contradict the traditional isolationist approach to incarceration. But how well is the traditional approach working?

"The prison population is growing 13 times faster than the general population," Newt Gingrich pointed out in a recent Washington Post op-ed. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 50 percent of the inmates who are released this year will be back inside prison walls within three years. What if, instead of exiling inmates from the outside world, from new technologies and information, the correctional system made a greater effort to offer monitored, secure, but more expansive access to new technologies, a legitimate alternative to contraband smartphones?

To an extent, the correctional system is already...