1st June 2012
Tweeting prisoners by Matthew Whitehead Andy Stanford-Clark with contribution from Mark Alexander HMP Gartree
“When my friend and colleague Mark Alexander was convicted of the murder of his father in 2010 it wasn’t long before I started talking to a friend of mine to work out how we could increase Mark’s ability to communicate with the outside world. Working in the technology industry it’s not long before either of us tries to apply our skills to a given problem. Andy has a long and established history of developing technologies that allow remote devices to connect with the rest of the world. To both of us Mark was just another hard-to-reach source of information and we wanted to make sure he was connected.
Before Mark went to prison he was an avid user of Twitter. By the time he was convicted in September 2010 he had around 100 friends following him. To us Twitter seemed to be the perfect way for Mark to keep in touch with what his friends were up to, and to allow him to remain more closely in touch with people he could longer contact as easily as he used to.
As well as keeping Mark informed, it was also designed to let his community of online friends know more about life in prison. It wasn’t long before it was serving more of a purpose than just letting his friends know what was on the menu that day, how he felt, or how his music practice was going; Mark has been working to clear his name ever since his conviction 18 months ago. As he goes through the process of appeals and his legal team make progress, we wanted Mark to be able to give his friends updates on the case and his campaign.
When Andy and I sat down to work out a way to connect him to Twitter we already had a raft of tools at our disposal. First and foremost we knew we had to have a way of getting messages into the prison. Without this it wouldn’t matter how clever our software was, we’d have to call it a day before we’d even begun. Mobile phones are banned and we knew inmates didn’t have access to email, but we did know about a website called emailaprisoner.com. The website provides a service that allows anyone to write to a prisoner. When an email reaches the prison it’s destined for, it’s printed out and delivered by hand just as if it had been received through the post. We’d both been using the service already to write letters directly to Mark and we decided it would be the perfect way for us to get messages to Mark.
The application we’ve written works by subscribing to the messages Mark’s friends post on Twitter. When messages are posted online they’re received by our software and compiled into a list of messages long enough to make up a complete email. Because the emailaprisoner.com website allows messages of up to 2,500 characters and Twitter messages can be up to 140 characters, each email we send tends to contain 15-20 individual messages. Mark’s friends can also send him messages directly by sending a DM or ‘direct message’ to his Twitter account. Their message gets appended onto the next email and we tag the different types of message so Mark knows whether they’ve been posted on a friend’s feed or sent directly to him.
To allow Mark to reply to messages and post his own updates on Twitter we still have to rely on more traditional means. Every couple of weeks Mark writes a letter to one of us listing the updates he’d like posting. We then type up each message and post it on his Twitter account.
While writing this article about the project we asked Mark if he could sum up the benefits he gets from using the system:
“It keeps me in tune with the fast paced nature of the world I find myself cut off from in prison. I feel tangibly closer to my friends because I get a real sense of their day to day lives and experiences through their updates, whilst in turn I’m able to share my own. In pervading such an extreme environment it brings a whole new dimension to our normal conception of ‘social media’, and offers a real gateway to reality. The impact it has had is enormous.”
We hope that our software will allow Mark to stay in touch more closely with his friends and to keep up to date with the latest activity on a social network the rest of us take for granted. With people becoming more used to rattling off quick Twitter-length messages on the move, it also makes it easier for people to fit messaging Mark into their busy lives.
Written by Matthew Whitehead and Andy Stanford-Clark, with contribution from Mark Alexander (HMP Gartree)
https://insidetime.org/tweeting-prisoners/
Tweet-a-Prisoner: Social Media and Prisoners Posted by clarehooper
A friend of mine called Mark Alexander is in prison, wrongly convicted of murdering his father. I know Mark from my IBM days, which means our mutual friends include the wonderful Andy Stanford-Clark and Matt Whitehead.
He’s been in prison for quite some months (good lord, they went fast :/ ), and we’ve primarily been staying in touch via a service called Email a Prisoner. You type your letter into an online form, pay 30p and hit ‘send’. It gets printed in the prison in question, popped into an envelope and delivered to the prisoner, who of course can reply by snail mail.
(Andy and I have been discussing related issues of latency — for example, hearing bad news by phone one day and receiving a happy letter from before that news the next. I believe he may write about this shortly.)
Email A Prisoner is a nice service, and has been complemented by us visiting Mark, and by phone calls between Mark and Andy (in which Andy often ends up relaying greetings!). Still, these communication mechanisms are a world away from the fast-paced world of social media, even if Email A Prisoner does make things easier: as an expat living in the Netherlands, I have much more contact with my online British friends than the offline ones.
So I was absolutely delighted when Andy and Matt implemented Tweet A Prisoner! As you might imagine, it rather does what it says on the tin — Mark has a Twitter account (tap_MA), and with a bit of technological and social jiggery-pokery is able to update it from prison. Andy’s written an excellent explanation of how the system works.
I wanted to share a few words about the relevance of this to my EngD, where I focused on the redesign of digital experiences for non-digital contexts. As Andy observes in his write-up, in this case we were forced to use non-digital media for parts of the system, yet unless you’re Matt (i.e. the ‘social component’ of the system — the person who is so kind as to close the loop and upload tweets written by Mark) that’s effectively invisible. If I didn’t know Mark’s situation (or read the content of his posts!), I could easily assume he just happens not to log into Twitter on a daily basis.
I’ve yet to chat with Mark about his personal point of view, but this certainly gives him a new way to interact with a bunch of people: he can stay in touch with friends and ex-colleagues, and share his experiences more widely. I’m intrigued as to how his visceral experience of Twitter is changed by this rather unusual set-up.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a dearth of work on prisoner engagement and social media, but I wonder if this isn’t a topic for conversation: social media can help prisoners reconnect with healthier environments. Would that now have an impact in areas such as mental health and rates of recidivism?
On a personal note, I was absolutely thrilled when I saw the first set of Mark’s tweets. Thank you Andy and Matt!
https://clarehooper.wordpress.com/tag/twitter/