Tablets coming for SD inmates

They won’t have access to Facebook or Twitter, but every inmate in South Dakota’s prison system will soon have their own tablet computer.

The touchscreen devices, connected to a closed network, will be offered for free to the Department of Corrections by telephone provider Global Tel Link.

The tablets mean longer phone calls with family and friends, and text messages – without photos or attachments – and will allow inmates to pay for access to games, music and e-books through monthly subscriptions. Phone calls and text messages will be charged per minute or per message.

Female inmates in Pierre already have the tablets, and distribution to men’s prisons in Rapid City, Yankton, Springfield and Sioux Falls should be complete by mid-June, DOC Secretary Denny Kaemingk said.

South Dakota will join states like Colorado, Georgia and Indiana in its embrace of tablets for inmates, which are becoming more common through inmate telecom providers.

The Minnehaha County Jail recently added a limited number of tablets from CBM Managed Services of Sioux Falls, which inmates can check out at a $5 daily rate or borrow for 15 minutes every three hours.

“This is the route a lot of these commissary vendors and video vendors are going,” said Minnehaha County Jail Warden Jeff Gromer.

Kaemingk sees value in maintaining family connections through longer phone calls and messages, saying that re-offense rates drop when inmates maintain family ties.

He also has high hopes for tablet-based GED and college-level courses, anger management programs and other instructional programs. The DOC will meet at least twice this year to map out which courses to offer, Kaemingk said.

 “Education’s really going to be a strong feature for us here in South Dakota,” he said. “The more education someone receives, the lower the recidivism will be.”

Subscription prices are $4 a month for ebooks, $6 a month for games and $20 a month for music.

The tablets offer distraction, communication and education for inmates, but they offer security benefits for staff, according to Warden Darin Young at the state penitentiary.

Tablet phone calls and messages are recorded and stored for potential monitoring, and tablets can be shut off or confiscated for disciplinary reasons. Inmates who lose tablets would have to use public kiosks for calls.

The clear devices carry other security advantages, as well, Young said. Paper books can hide contraband passed from inmate to inmate, for example.

"You can’t pass contraband through an e-book,” Young said.

The tablets will streamline in-house communication and reduce the amount of time staff spends dealing with inmate information requests, Young said.

Inmates will no longer need to wait for answers to common questions. DOC policies will be uploaded to the tablets, as will legal libraries, complaint forms, all-prison messages and other items that inmates currently need staff assistance to obtain.

Tablets will eventually be used to maintain inmate banking records and track purchases from commissary – the prison’s general store – more accurately than the current paper system.

“With 1,500 inmates on campus, how many of them can write legibly and add things up perfectly?” Young said.

Those hopes are tied in part to Young’s experience at the Minnehaha County Jail, where he spent more nearly three years as warden. The jail has used a computer-based kiosk system for inmate accounts.

“I didn’t have to answer any questions about inmate accounts while I was at the jail,” Young said.

The jail’s new tablets are essentially portable kiosks, Warden Gromer said.

CBM, which has the commissary contract for the jail and the DOC and manages inmate purchases, also owns the tablets. Inmates punch in their CBM identification number to check out the tablets from docking stations in each cell block.

The jail warden sees the tablets as little more than an extension of traditional methods of occupying inmates’ time, such as newspapers, books, card games or television.

“We have a book cart that goes from cell block to cell block,” Gromer said. “This is just an expansion of that.”

Jail tablets do connect to the web, but inmates only have access to six websites: Fox News, CNN, Nasa, the White House, the Smithsonian and a Christian website called Crosswalk.

If an inmate tries to click a link to an external website, however – a link to a President Trump tweet on a news story about President Trump - the screen displays a message saying “this page cannot be displayed.”

That level of control was important to Lt. Mike Mattson of the Sheriff’s Office.

“I didn’t want Facebook on there, I didn’t want Twitter on there,” Mattson said.

With the controls in place, Mattson said, the tablets are a clear positive for officers and inmates. Unlike prison, where inmates have jobs to fill their time, jail inmates have little to do but sit.

“There’s a lot of idle time in here,” Mattson said. “If we can fill that idle time with positive things – or even just busy things – that’s a lot better for us.”