internet access a fundamental human right<\/a> with ties to the right to education.<\/p>\nDelaney said prison administrators often fear internet access for students could lead to violence or harm either inside or outside of the prison. But she said the fear, while legitimate, appears to be overblown.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a lot of evidence that people who go to college in prison are not involved in the activities you need to worry about,\u201d Delaney said. Students only qualify for prison education programs once they have a record of good behavior and even minor infractions can get them kicked out. They take the opportunity seriously.<\/p>\n
Joe Tragert, vice president of product strategy at EBSCOed, EBSCO\u2019s education division, helped create a prison version of EBSCO\u2019s database of research resources, which holds over a billion items, including academic articles and media archives that users can search. In the prisons, users can only read and download the resources once they\u2019ve been approved, but they can conduct their own searches and request access to documents. Tragert said he hears how dedicated people are to pursuing their degrees.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is their ticket to either getting out and staying out or just getting through the day,\u201d Tragert said.<\/p>\n
Limited opportunity<\/p>\n
Theresa Torricellas, 66, completed her bachelor\u2019s degree in liberal studies this spring through Roy\u2019s program at the California Institution for Women. She said EBSCO was her main research resource and while it was full of sources, she ran into dead ends trying to study conditions in Palestine last summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the information that I\u2019m interested in, it\u2019s just not in the media,\u201d Torricellas said at the time. \u201cIt\u2019s very rarely covered in the media.\u201d On the outside, she said she probably would have turned to social media for her research. On the inside, that wasn\u2019t an option.<\/p>\n
She also ran into problems with Wi-Fi access when she was working on her schoolwork. Wi-Fi is only available in designated common areas and the cells that happen to be close enough to pick up that signal. She lucked out for a while, but when she moved across the hall to get a cell with better sunlight, it didn\u2019t occur to her she might be leaving her Wi-Fi access behind. She only discovered that after it was too late.<\/p>\n
This past academic year, her routine was to go to the noisy dayroom to search EBSCO for documents she needed or log into her course software to download assignment details and then go back to her room to continue working offline. Interrupting this workflow was the limited storage space on the prison-issued laptops.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy laptop stopped working because I had downloaded so many EBSCO articles,\u201d Torricellas said. Another person in the prison education program said the same thing happened to her after downloading only two large PDFs, but the newer laptops distributed by the prison have more space.<\/p>\n
As the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation rolls out newer hardware, it is also expanding student access to research resources. Besides EBSCO, students are slowly gaining access to JSTOR, another searchable research database. Students studying in prisons through nearby college programs, like Roy\u2019s, get access to the JSTOR database through the college\u2019s existing license, meaning it\u2019s already paid for.<\/p>\n
Stacy Burnett, who directs the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative<\/a>, said many prisons offer an approach like EBSCO\u2019s, where someone has to review and approve each student request for a document. Others have expanded access with a bulk approval tool. In some cases, state prison systems have bulk-approved an entire discipline; in Colorado, officials bulk-approved everything in JSTOR.<\/p>\n\u201cIf it\u2019s on there, a student can read it,\u201d Burnett said. They can restrict access following a problem, but so far, Burnett said that hasn\u2019t happened.<\/p>\n
When Carlson got to prison, she was shocked by the low education levels of the women around her. She went to a rigorous high school and learned how to read, write and conduct research. Others didn\u2019t learn any of those skills. EBSCO and JSTOR offer a way to further their education inside. But Carlson said limited access to online research just compounds the lack of education many women got in the first place.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like when it comes to education,\u201d Carlson said, \u201cthe doors should be wide open.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Still, even under the best circumstances, incarcerated students are broadly kept away from much of the human knowledge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[174,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-65935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-internet","9":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}