Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Facebook is bad for prisoners...

...at least in South Carolina. In 2012 the Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies, such as murder. 

The department is really serious about these Facebook violations. It doesn't matter why you might be accessing Facebook or another social network. If you commit a Level 1 offense, you can find yourself in solitary confinement for years or deprived of virtually all privileges, including visitation and telephone access. There have been more than 400 cases of Level 1 violations using Facebook. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.

The average punishment length for a “social networking” case was 512 days in disciplinary detention, and the average length of lost privileges was even longer.  

The sentences are so long because SCDC issues a separate Level 1 violation for each day that an inmate accesses a social network. An inmate who posts five status updates over five days, would receive five separate Level 1 violations, while an inmate who posted 100 updates in one day would receive only one.

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