Encourage Authorship!
Heyhey, folks!
This one should be a slightly lighter post, and it's about encouraging people behind the concertina wire to write.
At this point in Florida, many inmates have the Jpay/Securus Tablet for Corrections Residents (or however you'd like to pretty phrase that). It's a computer running off-brand Android (specifically, AOSP 7.1.5, with no Google services).
What that means, at least in part, is that Android apps that do not have a Google Services dependency and can run on Android 7 "Nougat" could feasibly run here. This includes word processors, of course.
Now, I know this is but a dream in the pipes, but let's dream of intelligence together, shall we?
The Build
It's a digital frontier!
We start with a privately controlled storage server, controlled by either the Department of Corrections, or by our tablet vendor. It should, of course, be available for inmates to sync the stories, memoirs, research, and such that they have written, protecting their work from hardware failure.
Something like Seafile, ownCloud, or NextCloud would likely suffice, and typically has Android clients for managing the sync. Inmates don't need scads of storage -- 64 to 128 megabytes might be plenty for most, when coupled with a modern, compressed file format like OOXML (compatible with modern MS Word and its many alternatives).
Of course, we need a writer of some kind, and when I was last out, there were so many text editors and document writers that one doesn't have to choose just one editor to rule them all. The only caveat we have here, thus far, is it needs to not require external, free world authentication or Google Services installation. If MSOffice still fits the bill, I'll take it!
Offer, at no cost to inmates, a dictionary and thesaurus app, in addition to any built-in spelling checker and grammatical logic checker, to help hone those literary skills.
Combine the writer and remote backups with access to publications that take inmate submissions, like writing contests, magazines and such, and maybe a written word to printed book service, for those of us who would turn our works into something lasting. Toss in an electronic publishing option that makes ebooks available for Nook, Kobo, and Amazon, with revenue sharing that contributes part to the fines we inmates have to pay to get out typically after serving our sentences, for good measure!
Give inmates a reason to hone their literary chops, to seek education -- when someone sees their buddy not on that prison hustle train washing another man's laundry, but making a few bucks a week because he's written some fascinating short story that people are buying, they will want to know how he's done it.
And Why!
I didn't eat all that pizza and get all those Book It! pins as a kid for nothing, dang it. Writing is as important as reading; otherwise, we run out of words, out of fresh respins of ideas that take a different approach to age old questions to see if we might learn something new.
Perhaps in some sun-torched prison, someone has been sitting on a new or unheard view about clean energy, or tackling water scarcity, or has some novel ways of preparing foodstuffs in a scarcity environment.
Maybe someone has a brilliantly put insight borne of decades of being inside the concertina wire at America's worst writer's retreat system (to crib from an author friend of mine), and maybe it's a thing that should be shared with the world sooner rather than later.
That might be food for thought.
For now, I encourage you to do what you can to fight for prison reforms. You all are our megaphones here on the inside, after all.
Take care, and please remember to hydrate. :)