- NJ prisoners get only twenty and 1.44 MB of disks, just enough for appeals
- Lawyers must transfer Flash units files back to disks, which complicates the process
- The authorities say that the prohibition of Flash units is a matter of security
A prisoner from the New Jersey state prison has publicly expressed the frustration of being forced to trust apartments for critical legal work.
The United States State Penitentiary System restricts inmates to the use of disks, each with a maximum capacity of 1.44 MB, but each prisoner is allowed 20 disks, a limit that barely coincides with the needs of complex legal correspondence.
When writing for the journalism project in prison, Jorge Luis Alvarado said: “Within New Jersey state prison, it is like 1985, where we trust in outdated word processors, electric writing machines and floppy disks that are extinguished in the free world.”
Alvarado explains that even a single legal summary can exceed this size, which requires the use of multiple discs to store a document.
Such a process becomes cumbersome, and with the additional risk of corruption, the format introduces real uncertainty about how the archives are preserved.
In addition, since the main companies such as Sony stopped manufacturing floppies about 15 years, their scarcity only adds to the impracticability of the rule.
The dependence of the disk media seems especially arbitrary, since they only have about a year of useful life and that the flash units were adopted widely more than two decades ago.
In the early 2000s, the USB impulses quickly eclipsed the floppies, offering speed and durability.
Nowadays, they are economical, compact and reliable, with the capacity that far exceeds anything that the floppy time can provide.
Even consumer SSD options are now extended to the Terabyte range, with the largest SSD models that rival business storage.
The devices once labeled as the fastest SSD can administer transfers that eclipse everything possible with the inherited media.
However, the authorities argue that the prohibition of Flash units is a matter of security, which suggests that they could be misused within prison environments.
While this position explains the reluctance to modernize, it leaves prisoners at a disadvantage when it comes to legal issues where technology should serve as a bridge, not a barrier.
Alvarado describes a process in which lawyers must copy digital files into flash units, just to transfer them to the floppy disks through a single computer computer.
Delays are inevitable, and access often takes days at the same time.
Some researchers estimate that between four and six percent of those imprisoned in the United States can be innocent.
Therefore, even if a fraction of these individuals faces barriers for appeals due to outdated technology, the problem extends far beyond inconvenience.
Via Hardware Toms
