Unique Barriers To Digital Equity Among Incarcerated Individuals

Introduction

Broadband access to digital information and the applications and skills to find, evaluate, organize, create, and communicate such information has the potential to improve health outcomes, educational attainment and achievement, employment stability, economic success, and social and civic participation and decrease recidivism among incarcerated individuals during their period of confinement and upon release.

Unfortunately, even when incarcerated individuals have nominal access to digital devices and a broadband connection to the internet, they face unique barriers to obtaining access to critical digital information, applications, and skills.

There are two categories of barriers that stand between incarcerated individuals and digital inclusion and literacy: barriers that prevent advocates and service providers from designing and implementing programs for digital inclusion and literacy among incarcerated individuals and barriers that, more or less, directly prevent access to digital information, services, applications, and skills among incarcerated individuals.

Barriers to Advocacy

The root of barriers to advocacy is simple: digital equity for incarcerated individuals is an undeveloped field. Indeed, digital access among incarcerated individuals is a relatively new phenomenon. The idea that incarcerated individuals face unique barriers to digital inclusion and literacy as a result of the custodial context in which they live or that unique strategies are required to overcome these barriers is simply unexamined.

Indeed, there exists no shared understanding about what digital equity even means in a!custodial context. Surely nobody is!suggesting that incarcerated individuals should have the same level of freedom of access to the full panoply of content on the internet that their non-incarcerated counterparts enjoy. Nonetheless, by suggesting that incarcerated individuals are deserving of digital inclusion and literacy, the Digital Equity Act can be understood to require that some level of access should be available in custodial contexts. But to what degree?

With these questions unanswered, how can advocates be expected to understand the unique digital context within which incarcerated individuals live or the unique barriers to digital inclusion and literacy that arise from that context, yet alone design strategies for overcoming those barriers?

Moreover, there exists no shared vocabulary with which to even discuss these issues. There exists no tools or best practices for evaluating the lack of digital inclusion and literacy in a custodial context or for designing, developing, and implementing digital equity programs for incarcerated individuals and no roadmap roadmap to guide or inform digital equity efforts for incarcerated individuals.

Given these constraints, it is no wonder that community-led digital inclusion and literacy programs for incarcerated individuals are virtually nonexistent.

Access, Affordability, Awareness, and Ability Barriers

Like others suffering from digital inequity, incarcerated individuals encounter barriers associated with access, affordability, awareness, and ability. In the custodial context, however, ESE barriers take on unique forms.

Access Barriers

In the field of digital equity, access barriers typically refer to the lack of broadband availability from commercial carriers to the individual's residence. Individuals who live in neighborhoods with no access to broadband via cable, telephone, microwave, cellular, or satellite might be said to be facing barriers to access. In the custodial context, however, whether a commercial carrier offers broadband service to the location of the prison or jail is only one small part of the access equation. The larger part pertains to whether the custodial agency allows e incarcerated individuals in its care to access such a connection at all, and if so, to what extent.

Custodial agencies make broadband connectivity available to incarcerated individuals in two ways: via community anchor institutions and via personal devices.

Community anchor institutions, in the custodial context, refers to institutional schools, vocation programs, employment programs, and libraries. Each of these program areas may make computers with broadband connections available to assigned incarcerated individuals, but access is necessarily limited in a variety of ways.

Access to community digital devices and connectivity is limited to the small percentage of the incarcerated population assigned to the program. Those incarcerated individuals can only access e community devices while participating in the assigned program and at the assigned location (e.g., work or school.) Finally, the community devices only make some small set if applications and content available and assigned individuals are limited to using them for assigned purposes.

Personal devices, which may be owned by the incarcerated individual, the custodial agency, or the vendor, may share some of these limitations. For example, laptops assigned to incarcerated students may be used only for specific purposes and only within Wi-Fi range of the school. Wireless tablets, which are provided by contract from a vendor/service provider, have the fewest limitations of the broadband enabled digital devices available in custodial contexts.

Wireless tablets, for example, can generally be used while in the incarcerated individual's housing, allowing for more frequent and casual use. These devices are generally available to the entire incarcerated population, or at least the subset of the population that can afford them. Finally, the tablets can generally be uses for a greater variety of purposes such as leisure, entertainment, commumio, and self-directed research and learning.

Unfortunately, the wireless tablets allowed to incarcerated individuals still suffer from the greatest limitation: lack of

• Meaningful and engaging content and services that meet the information needs of incarcerated individuals and that is discoverable, navigable, and usable
• Bug-free, full-featured applications with which to find, view, evaluate, organize, create, and communicate digital information

This lack of content and applications constitutes the gravamen of the unique access barriers to digital inclusion and literacy among incarcerated individuals and consists of multiple dimensions:

• Whether the content or application is available at all
• Whether, if available, the content is difficult or impossible to find
• Whether, if found, the content is difficult or impossible to use either because it is poorly designed or because the app used to view it contains bugs or lacks necessary features

Affordability Barriers

In the field of digital equity, affordability barriers typically refer to the inability to afford a broadband plan and/or digital device. Incarcerated individuals may face barriers to the affordability of digital devices, but, because they are not allowed to purchase their own broadband plans, they never face the inability to afford such a plan. On the other hand, incarcerated individuals face affordability barriers not faced by their non incarcerated counterparts.

When custodial agencies enter into contracts with digital service providers, they must decide whether to require the service provider to make digital devices (e.g., wireless tablets) available to the entire incarcerated population or whether incarcerated individuals must purchase their own device. In the latter case, device affordability will be a prohibitive barrier to digital inclusion and literacy for some incarcerated individuals.

Even in cases where an incarcerated individual is provided, or can afford, a digital device, she will face many barriers associated with affordability. Though incarcerated individuals are not charged a monthly broadband service fee, they are charged a variety of fees for services that are free to their non incarcerated counterparts.

For example, some incarcerated individuals are charged per-minute usage fees anytime they are using their tablet, whether to play games, read public domain books, or check their account balance. Others are charged per-use or per-minute fees for normally free services such as texting and emaling or voice or video calls. Still others are charged monthly fees for otherwise free content such as news feeds and podcasts.

Awareness Barriers

In the field of digital equity, awareness barriers typically refer to either a lack of awareness of plans for affordable digital devices or broadband or a lack of awareness of the benefits of digital inclusion and literacy. Affordability plans are not an Immediate concern in the custodial context, but the lack of awareness of the benefits of a digital device and broadband connectivity is. In fact, this barrier has multiple dimensions in the custodial context:

• Lack of awareness of the social, health, economic, and employment benefits of broadband access to information
• Lack of awareness of available content and information that meets informational needs while in prison, preparing for release, and upon release
• Lack of awareness of the benefit of practicing digital skills while incarcerated that will be required for success upon release

Ability Barriers

Many incarcerated individuals have no experience using digital technologies either because they could not afford afford them before their incarceration or because the digital technologies did not exist before their term of incarceration began. Others will have some digital experience before their incarceration, but will have fallen behind as technologies advanced while they served their sentence. In either case, the lack of digital knowledge and skills that results from this inexperience is a significant barrier to digital inclusion and literacy.

Digital literacy consists of the skills required use digital technology to find, evaluate, organize, create, and communicate digital information. Incarcerated individuals may lack these high level skills and/or prerequisite skills, such as:

• The skills required to use and manage a digital device, including the skills required to use a keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, and peripherals
• The skills required to use a particular operating system, including the skills required to install applications, manage a file system, configure a device, and use the windowing system
• The skills required to use applications such as web browsers, email clients, file managers, word processors, and calendar apps