James’s Blog

Week 1: March 9, 2009 – March 13, 2009

Hi! This week, I found a blog on Global Voices Online on from a blogger who lives in the US. Her name is Hoa Quach, and she writes about crime and law conflicts in the US.

I found an interesting blog by her about a new trend and pastime of inmates in prison, blogging. Most of the prisoners who like to blog are because they either want to let other people know about their life in jail, or they want to communicate with other prisoners and share their thoughts. Now, about 1% of all the prisoners in the US have written blogs and edited them as their favorite hobby. Some of them write about their personal life in jail and others have blogging pen pals from other jails. This not only tells other prisoners what’s going in the world, but it can also help people who have social and mental issues. Four heroine and other drug dealers who are isolated because of emotional and mental problems have asked other prisoners to become pen pals with them. Another one of the blogs was from a group of prisoners who were in jail because of violently protesting against animal testing in a lab facility called SHAC7. One of the group’s members wrote that he will continue to fight and refuses to call his jail a home. Here is an excerpt from the blog:

“As of today the state has stolen the last two years of my life. On November 16th of 2006, I walked into the nearby Federal Detention Center, was stripped naked, given a jumpsuit, and thrown in a cell for advocating controversial tactics to shut down an animal lab.

The first inmates I met gave me some advice— try to forget you are here. Don’t think about the time. Do your best not to remember the outside world. What awful advice! Although it might make my life harder, I’m relieved that I still bristle at incarceration. I never want to be one of the fully domesticated folks who slowly stop seeing the bars and razor wire and start to consider this place home. I hate prison with a passion. That lets me know I’m still sane.”

I was amazed at first that this kind of thing in happening in the world. In my opinion, this could either turn out to be positive or negative. In a positive aspect, the prisoners who had written a blog and asked for pen pals can actually regain their social and mental health back again. Staying in touch with other friends can be better than taking unneccessary medicine for their condition. On the other hand, in the negative perspective, communicating with other people in other jails or in the outside world can be dangerous in the future if at least they watch what the prisoners are writing about. (Who knows, the prisoners could be plotting another murderous crime while in jail and the guards won’t even notice…)

One technological tool that I find very useful to obtain this information is iGoogle. Instead of going to the website to browse thousands of blogs that favors me and wasting time, I could just go to my iGoogle and select from about ten blog headlines for a one that I like. I just have to focus my blog feed on my region and in the blink of an eye, I will receive the newest blog titles and updates from Global Voices.

In a short conclusion, I believe I have learned something new and current from this website. It makes me more connected and informed about the outside world in a short, but realistic way. In my opinion, a blog is much more fun to read than a news article because it isn’t biased, boring, or long. I’ll have to keep watch for any more interesting blog articles that might favor me and next week, I should be writing another post soon.

 Here is a link to the blog: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/03/06/usa-blogging-from-prison/

P.S. Please feel free to comment on this.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.