description:

Between the Bars is a broadcast media platform for people in prison that strives to interrupt the destructive isolation of prisons through public, online conversation. We seek to end the silence around the devistating impacts of incarceration and begin to change the cultural conversation about crime and punishment through dialogue.

Prisons are, by there very nature, structured against dialogue. With loved ones locked up often hundreds of miles away, visitation can be expensive. Phone calls are controlled by monopolies at extortionate rates. The most ubiquitious form of communication, postal mail, is alienating to today's Internet society. Even so, were these forms of communication not plagued by such barriers, they would still only be in the form of one to one communication, not many to many.

Between the Bars enables those who are incarcearted to participate in the conversation taking place on the most important tool for dialogue since perhaps cable communications, the Internet. We provide access to the Internet through the paper mail.

We receive hand written blog posts from writers in prison, scan them, and post them online to the authors' individual blogs. When visitors leave comments, we print them and mail them back to the writer in prison. Using a reply ID, the blogger can respond directly to the commenter which we can thread in a conversation just like any other blog. Anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can help by processing the mail, uploading scans, and transcribing posts to make them searchable.

contributions:

I joined Between the Bars in it's infancy, since the days when we scanned letters at a painfully slow pace, and used a tiny python script to parse the scan into individual documents. Since that time we've grown to manage over 250 bloggers. I've written numerous grants, and made major contributions in writing our articles of incorporation and by-laws.

The contributions I"m proudest of have been more qualitative as a member of our small community of four that run the show. Before joining Between the Bars, I had never been a part of a consensus based decision making body outside the context of an ensemble theatre cast. Struggling together to make decisions that we can all feel good about has been a wonderful and growthful process.

The other contributions I've taken pride in have been in the design of the site and systems that allow it to work. Despite a valient effort, the Between the Bars codebase is still a bit too complex to implement my own features, however, I am very proud to say that I conceived of and designed a number of significant additions some of which include the following:

• An automatic prompt that is shown to a user when they finish a transcripton, asking them if they'd also like to leave a comment. This accounts for a fair ammount of our comments.
• A processing interface where the images scrolled behind the meta data entry fields (formerly, you had to scroll back and forth).
• Stock responses, comment moderation, and notifications.
• Improved back-end mail management filters .
• Writing collectives .
• The ability for bloggers to respond to a prompt to partipate in offline events which eventually led to the creation of the campaigns feature.

challenges and lessons:

• We expected to scale by allowing advocacy organizations to manage their own constinuents thereby amplifying the organization's voice. Groups loved this idea, but always lacked the capacity to implement it. As such, we have not been able to grow beyond the same set of bloggers that we gathered within our first year.
• While prisons do not have access to the Internet, the laws governing the Internet attention span reign supreme even through the mail. People read things that engage them such that it is worth their time to read it. That's not very surprising in hindsight, but it was an insight I had nonetheless, and one that will guide our future directions.
• It's hard to know how to help. I fumbled a number of instances in which the boundaries of the friendship I was trying to extend to our bloggers as a co-operator of the site, became confused with actual friendship. I am both the confused and the confuser, and I have come to accept that this will be in constant tension. Though I have come to negotiate this more gracefully, I also feel there is not a hard and fast rule I could employ. To have such a rule would leave me closed off to the human truth of the situation.
• In order to have dialogue, to learn, and grow, we have to have spaces that leave room for people to be hurtful. If you don't, people won't have the opportunity to learn to speak otherwise, much less, an opportunity to talk about the hurt.
• Consensus based organzations can have leadership without hierarchy, and must to thrive.

future directions:

In order to have dialogue, we'll have to have visitors to the site. To attract visitors, we'll have to increase the quality of the writing on the site. In order to do so, we will begin to limit the volume that people can post, which will allow us to take on new bloggers. Those new bloggers will be purposely chosen to represent a diversity of authors in proporation to those who are incarcerated geographically and demographically. We will require that bloggers dedicate a certain amount of their writing to specific chosen topics.

To expand our audience, we will devise a way for those who are in prison to read and comment on the writing of our bloggers. Ideally, we could expand to hire a community organizer to help us shape those who are helping us with the labor into a community of people who actively manage the site. Finally, we will create more pathways for people to help process the mail by sepparating out tasks that do not require seasoned moderation.