Not Everyone Loves This Lo-fi Internet for Inmates

This article appears in The Incarceration Issue, a special edition of VICE Australia

Cross Facebook with snail mail and you'll get iExpress, a site that lets Australian prisoners create online profiles, post status updates, and share photos. Email and social media are banned in Australian prisons but prisoner advocates Justice Action have a simple workaround. Inmates send their details by mail to the service, which then sets up a profile page, complete with an inbox. Any incoming messages get printed and put in the post.

iExpress coordinator Brett Collins—who spent 10 years in prison during the 70s and has worked with the community ever since—acknowledges that people are in jail for a reason, but says expressions of remorse are common. "It's a chance for them to move on and be seen to be moving on in their life and that's very much to the benefit of the whole community," he told VICE.

But counting Julian Knight—the gunman who killed seven in the 1987 Hoddle Street Massacre—among its members, iExpress predictably has its detractors. Crime Victims Support Association (CVSA) president Noel McNamara says the website is unfair to those affected by crime. "What are they doing? Giving up their versions of what they think is going on. Let them do it when they get out of jail."

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