Books, letters, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers have been good enough for prisoners for decades, so there's no reason to complicate matters with this newfangled Internet. As the appeal puts it: "Simply because advances in technology have made the gathering and disseminating of information easier and less costly does not mean that the traditional means of communication are constitutionally inadequate."

The sheer volume of what's already out there and could be coming into prison mailrooms is the problem, argues the state. "The increase in mail occasioned by the introduction of large volumes of Internet materials would make it much more difficult for busy mailroom staff to detect contraband and coded gang messages hidden among material downloaded from the Internet," charge the supporting documents of the appeal. The state's attorneys predicted "lengthy delays" in the delivery of all prison mail if this policy isn't allowed to stand.

Attorneys for the ACLU countered in their own brief that to "arbitrarily exclude an entire category of mail" is no way to deal with an increase in mail volume. They suggested that there were other, less egregious alternatives: The prison could restrict the number of pages permitted in enclosures or the number of items of mail an individual prisoner could receive.

Is the state of California really worried about scads of documents from the Net clogging up prison mailrooms? The EFF's Tien doesn't think so. He speculates that the real motivation behind the Pelican Bay anti-Internet rule, and others like it, is a concern about prison pen pal Web sites, such as PrisonPenPals.com.

Such sites have inspired controversy around the country. To the horror of one murdered 13-year-old girl's parents, a Greenwich, Conn. man serving 30 years for first-degree manslaughter recently showed up on one site; the convict is pictured online wearing a tuxedo, bragging that he's "romantic and always funny," the New York Times reported.

The prison pen pal sites have inspired direct crackdown attempts. In Arizona, House Bill 2376, passed in 2000, banned prisoners from having information about them appear on Internet sites. The bill was inspired by the outrage of Stardust Johnson, the widow of a murder victim who discovered her husband's killer soliciting correspondents on PrisonPenPals.com. On the site, the inmate was pictured cuddling a kitten.

Arizona's legislation aimed to ban all information about Arizona prisoners from appearing on the Internet, and had provisions for punishing prisoners if they showed up online. But in May 2003, a federal district judge in Phoenix ruled that the restriction violated not only prisoners' First Amendment rights, but the rights of advocacy groups, including the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, a group that creates Web pages for death row inmates.

Tien argues that banning Web page and e-mail printouts won't really solve the problem of coded messages potentially being included in correspondence from pen pals: "I could make an e-mail look like a letter," he says. "I could strip off the headers, or I could copy the body of the message without the headers. I could copy the damn thing down in ink."

Tien's observations raise a salient point: Perhaps the California Department of Corrections should focus on monitoring the content of prisoners' communications, rather than tarring the medium used to generate them.

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