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Let Prison Laptops Do What They’re Meant To Do: How Self-Directed Office App Use Builds Real Digital Literacy

College is supposed to be a launchpad, not a locked drawer. When incarcerated students in California receive secure laptops with Microsoft Office, they finally get a safe, structured way to practice the everyday digital work most jobs and civic tasks now require. CDCR’s own rollout materials emphasized that these laptops include standard Office applications used on classroom desktops and links to approved academic resources—tools meant to make learning more authentic and more transferable to life after release.

Self-directed use of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher is not a luxury or a distraction; it is the pedagogy of fluency. Completing a professor’s narrowly defined paper may demonstrate compliance, but the habits that employers actually reward—drafting clear memos, modeling simple budgets, organizing data, building a one-page brief or a basic flyer—emerge through unguided tinkering and repetition. In digital skills research and practice, this informal time-on-task is where learners move from “I can follow the steps” to “I can solve the problem,” building confidence, speed, and judgment that assignments alone rarely cultivate.

This matters because the federal Digital Equity Act (part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) defines digital literacy as the skills needed to find, evaluate, organize, create, and communicate information with technology. That is a definition anchored in real-world production, not just course-bound compliance. When students are prevented from using Office to draft a résumé between classes, experiment with a spreadsheet to track expenses, or storyboard a presentation for a peer-led group, they are being blocked from precisely the “create and communicate” dimension that the law treats as core literacy. Local Infrastructure Hub

The same law identifies incarcerated individuals as a covered population that digital-equity efforts are meant to reach. California’s State Digital Equity Plan (SDEP) carries that mandate forward, describing a statewide program to close the digital divide through device access, digital navigation, and digital skills training that enables meaningful use. It is written to serve the most excluded Californians and to build their capacity to participate fully in work, education, and civic life—outcomes that depend on practice opportunities beyond the boundaries of a syllabus.

National guidance from NTIA on digital equity likewise stresses that inclusion requires devices that meet users’ needs, access to training, quality support, and applications designed to enable self-sufficiency. That last phrase is crucial: self-sufficiency implies the autonomy to try, fail, iterate, and produce artifacts that are not limited to a professor’s prompt. It is exactly the kind of low-risk experimentation that self-directed Office work allows.

CDCR’s new prohibition—threatening discipline or expulsion for using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Publisher for any purpose other than the text of a specific assignment—reverses that logic. It artificially narrows learning to graded outputs and treats every other form of practice as misuse. In carceral settings where supervised, sandboxed computing time is scarce, eliminating informal use doesn’t merely reduce enrichment; it removes the principal pathway by which learners become fluent, adaptable, and job-ready. It also deepens the divide between how schoolwork is done inside and how knowledge work is done outside, where tasks span emails, trackers, drafts, decks, and quick one-pagers that no course rubric will ever fully anticipate.

From a compliance perspective, the policy is misaligned on three fronts. First, it contradicts the Digital Equity Act’s digital-literacy definition by blocking creation and communication activities that are not pre-authorized by a syllabus, thereby chilling the very competencies the Act aims to foster among covered populations such as incarcerated individuals. Second, it conflicts with California’s SDEP, which commits the state to building skills and capacity for meaningful adoption; a blanket ban on informal practice suppresses adoption and undermines skill-building by design. Third, to the extent CDCR is a direct or indirect beneficiary of state or federal digital-equity investments for devices, connectivity, or training, a policy that curtails informal skills practice runs against grant-recipient obligations to advance—not restrict—digital inclusion outcomes emphasized in NTIA guidance.

A more constructive approach is both simple and safe: maintain the existing security controls on the laptops and the curated, instructor-approved resources, but allow students to use Office for self-directed work between and beyond assignments. Security is preserved; learning accelerates. The result is a workflow that looks like modern life, not a caricature of it, and one that prepares people for employment, reentry responsibilities, and civic participation.

Conclusion

Informal, self-directed use of Office applications is the engine of digital fluency. It is how learners turn course exposure into durable mastery. By outlawing that practice, CDCR’s new policy does more than hamper creativity—it undercuts the federal Digital Equity Act’s literacy standard, conflicts with California’s State Digital Equity Plan, and undermines CDCR’s obligations as a recipient of public investments intended to expand, not constrict, digital skills. To comply with the Act, honor the SDEP, and meet grant-recipient duties, CDCR should restore students’ ability to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher for self-directed learning within the secure environment it already controls.