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Where are we on the list, Sec. Dixon?

Hi there!
Today is a little nitpick session on a video made available to the inmate population of the Florida prison system.

In this video, Secretary Ricky Dixon proclaims that funding has been secured to pay 15 education supervisor roles, 164 educators, and 30 transition (that is, prison-to-free-world) specialists.

The idea I actually applaud, genuinely. If these positions come onboard as he suggests in a timely manner, and inmates actually invest themselves into taking positive advantage of the chances, it might take an actual bite out of recidivism.

My query string begins with the execution of said plans.

I ask, where do the private contractor-run facilities fall on that list?
As I dye our facility's proverbial hair red, I cannot help but point out the delay in sweeping changes reaching us in private prison land, for good or for bad.

Our most recent change is our inmate commissary (the canteen in local speak), where we appear to be the last to suffer the most recent inflationary wave of pricing. I base my response on data I cannot personally verify, having been in a private facility since sometime in March, but inflate our prices actually did.
This is an increase standing on the shoulders of already increased pricing like one would expect at a gas station here in the US.
To wit, it is now ~16.92¢/packet for mayonnaise, purchased in sleeves of 12; 78¢ per pack of Maruchan ramen; $2.14 for either a glazed or iced honey bun; $6.18 for a bag of instant decaf coffee.
You might wish to recall my Prison Inflation post in late May 2023 for a reference to prices; nearly everything we buy has gone up even higher, and for little reason.

If these increases are supposed to, at least in part, fund the addition of educators to our system, then please don't make us wait until last for an improvement in educational access.

Virtual <span>ner!

There was mention in the video of virtual learning through their learning labs; It would be interesting to see what they are making available.

I sit in my class five days a week, trying to help write content for my fellow classmates, so that they have something to learn. We make do with a near-total lack of tools. What we have is a Windows 10-based server that we connect to via RDC; it has a copy of an old typing tutor app, Apache OpenOffice 4.1.10, a copy of Blender 2.9.something, and reasonably recent-ish copies of Inkscape and Gimp.

In my ideal world, we would have so much more, given that our class is meant to be a technical support course. Our instructor is trying to get us more resources, but the bureaucracy of chain of command is being set up to make our instructor fail, even as they struggle to prove that they actually give a damn about us.

A wish list that is strange and reasonable.

What would I provision inmates who want to learn in our class?
A lot of free stuff!

  • Offline Wikipedia articles on computers and technology in general
  • Offline Wiktionary, as much of it as we can get
  • Visual Studio Community Edition with the entire kitchen sink of choices preinstalled
  • Visual Studio Code (since Atom apparently was retired in early 2023)
  • Notepad++
  • Caddy
  • Latest version of Firefox, MSEdge, Brave, and Chrome
  • VirtualBox or another OS virtualization suite with install media for several Linux distros
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux
  • LibreOffice
  • A library of free ebooks on computers, computing in general, scripting and programming languages
  • An offline cache of videos showing how to assemble, repair, and/or disassemble computers, printers, mobile devices, etc.
  • Khan Academy Lite for student access
  • MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Python, Perl, PHP, Go, Ruby
  • FileZilla
  • Electron Framework, Angular, Django, jQuery, SASS, LESS, ... lots of the free framework packages
  • Moodle (or another schooling content management system)
  • WordPress

You're observant in that I ask for things that can be run offline, within a walled garden, I'm sure. As inmates, we do not get access to raw internet. There's no casual cruising over to YouTube to watch Jeff Geerling tinker with some of the latest Raspberry Pi Compute Module carrier boards, no watching Jeff of Craft Computing do fun builds of hardware just to see if it can be done; no watching anything on YouTube, really.
Nor is there falling into a wiki-based rabbit hole and seeing how far it goes, learning about processor architectures, finding out what VLIW means, or finding out that DDR5 is a thing.

... And that means modern resources that the free world uses to learn are largely off the table. Offline collections that can be run inside our network, especially freely offered ones, would go a long way toward modernizing our learning resources, combatting recividism by keeping our skills relevant to the current day and age.

There exists in the framework given for our class a module on learning HTML and CSS. This explains some of the tools I want (Notepad++, VSCode, Caddy, among others): if someone really wants to learn HTML and CSS, and maybe learn WordPress theming, it gives that person a possible side hustle when they get out. Selling a nice theme for a few bucks might be the difference between barely surviving, and living.

Or, tackling learning C# and writing their own software might land them a fair chance as a junior software developer when they go free.

If nothing else, I hate to see the opportunity squandered, so I close with an ask:

Secretary Dixon, thank you for committing to better. Please work with the inmate population, especially those of us who want those better opportunities, and are wanting to share our vision with you. We have an opportunity, and simply, humbly ask for tools.

As always, I exhort you, my reader, to learn and grow, to be better together as I work on being better apart. Make your communities stronger and please, remember that a returner to the free world has done their penance. They deserve to have access to strength, not to be pushed back down.

Take care. :) 👋🏾