"It was the Fourth of July, and I was in my Sing Sing cell, sweating in the heat, perched on the edge of my bunk with my feet dunked in a bucket of cold sink water. What really had me burning, though, was that the Wi-Fi had been down in my block for three days. I couldn't use my tablet to reach my friend and publicist, Megan, who handles my outside email and edits. With my brain boiling, I could hardly write; I usually work in the drafts folder of the messaging app, and now I was locked out."
"When I got locked up almost 24 years ago, I never imagined we'd one day have Wi-Fi inside. In 2019, the prison communications company Securus installed kiosks across all New York facilities and issued every prisoner a clear, 6-inch tablet (imagine a clunky, low-grade iPad). By 2024, the kiosks were mostly abandoned, and our tablets had been upgraded with Wi-Fi that let us send messages and make phone calls from our cells-though the internet itself remained off-limits."
On the Fourth of July at Sing Sing, a prolonged Wi‑Fi outage left a prisoner unable to access messages, edits, and interview questions needed for journalistic work. The outage exposed dependence on in-cell tablets and the difficulty of using yard phones due to gang control. Securus installed kiosks and issued tablets in 2019, and by 2024 tablets had Wi‑Fi that enabled messaging and calls from cells while keeping open internet blocked. The system aided journalism and connection with the outside but remained janky, profit-driven, and a target of activist calls for regulation and free communications.
Read at Fast Company
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