- NJ prisoners only receive floppy disks of twenty 1.44 MB, barely enough for calls
- Lawyers must transfer files from flash players to floppy disks, complicating the process
- The authorities say that the ban on flash readers is a matter of security
A prisoner of New Jersey’s state prison publicly expressed his frustration of being forced to count on disks for critical legal work.
The penitentiary system of the US state limits detainees to the use of floppy disks, each with a maximum capacity of 1.44 MB, but each prisoner authorized 20 disks, a limit which barely corresponds to the needs of a complex legal correspondence.
Writing for the prison journalism project, Jorge Luis Alvarado said: “Inside the New Jersey state prison, it is like 1985, where we rely on day -to -day text transformers, electric writing machines and disrects that disappear in the free world.”
Alvarado explains that even a single legal memoir can exceed this size, which requires the use of several discs to store a document.
Such a process becomes heavy, and with the additional risk of corruption, the format introduces real uncertainty about how the files are preserved.
In addition, since large companies like Sony have stopped making floppies about 15 years ago, their rarity only adds to the impractical rule.
The dependence on the floppy media seems particularly arbitrary, since there is only one year of lifespan and that the flash records were largely adopted more than two decades ago.
In the early 2000s, USB workouts quickly overshadowed floppies, offering both speed and sustainability.
Today, they are inexpensive, compact and reliable, with the ability to exceed everything that the era of the strain could provide.
Even the mainstream SSD options are now extending into the range of teraoctets, with the largest SSD models rivaling with business storage.
The devices formerly labeled, the fastest SSD, can manage transfers that overshadow everything that is possible with the inherited media.
However, the authorities argue that the prohibition of flash records is a matter of security, which suggests that they may be used in the evil in prison environments.
Although this position explains the reluctance of modernizing, it leaves the prisoners disadvantaged when they deal with legal issues where technology should serve as a bridge, no barrier.
Alvarado describes a process where avocados must copy digital files to flash discs, to transfer them to floppy disks via a single library computer.
Delays are inevitable, access often taking days at the same time.
Some researchers believe that between four and six percent of people who are incarcerated in the United States can be innocent.
Consequently, even if a fraction of these individuals is confronted with obstacles to calls due to obsolete technology, the problem extends far beyond the simple drawback.
Via Toms equipment
