DannyBoyinExile

With the arrival of the electronic tablets, TDCJ has officially (at long last) moved out of the Stone Age. Me, not so much…(just kidding)
But I am getting it figured out, and I must admit that I feel more connected to the rest of the world than I ever have – and that’s not a bad thing. Not to mention that that’s exactly what you should want for the men and women who are merely numbers today – but who will ultimately become members of your communities again.
Now, I can click onto my AP News app – and instantly learn far more about what’s going on in the world than I ever could by just catching a few minutes of the news as I waited in the dayroom for chow. That is, assuming they were watching the news at all, and not reruns of Law And Order or Charmed or whatever.
Who could’ve known that an electronic tablet is the best adult babysitter known to man? Some of the same guys who, just yesterday, were arguing about who is next for the phone, slamming dominoes onto the table, or fussing and fighting over what to watch on TV are staring glassy-eyed into their tablets all day, and are free to watch or call whatever they want, on their new toy.
I’ve seen many guys become Game Zombies, who now focus intently on their video games all day – but not me. I gave it a try (the game package, I mean, not becoming a zombie), but I guess I’m more of a nerd, because I prefer to read and write my time away.
There are a gazillion books in the Gutenberg Library, and they are free for any inmate to browse through. It contains lots of good historical or scientific knowledge, as well as many of the Classics – but not many of the novels most inmates are used to.
The emessaging is really cool, and makes it much easier and faster to send letters back and forth to friends and family. At first I was a little discouraged, because it took so many days for my incoming and outgoing messages to arrive, that I feared we had moved into, rather than out of, the Stone Age… But a little time passed, and all of us (the Administration as well as the inmates) have gotten the hang of it, and it has gotten much faster. Often I’ll send and receive messages from the same person several times throughout a single day – and that’s definitely something I could get used to.
There are also millions of songs or movies (literally) that you can purchase and then use to occupy yourself with. An inmate can be bored now – but not because he can’t find anything to do. The tablets took care of that.
Kudos to the TDCJ Administration who finally allowed this to happen. It can only prove to be a good thing, as it is never a bad idea to allow even the least of us in a society the opportunity to keep up with everything that’s going on in our society – in hopes of rejoining our society later on. So says DannyBoy.