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Recently, a lawyer for a prisoner in New Jersey, USA, sent him legal documents on a flash drive. A small caveat — flash drives are not allowed, only floppy disks are allowed.
Jorge Luis Alvarado spoke about the situation with storage media in his prison in PJP (“Prison Journalism Project”). The situation is as follows: prisoners are not allowed to have any storage devices other than floppy disks in the amount of up to 20 pieces. As you can imagine, this is not a very good medium for modern document management. But if you think that lawyers send them documents on floppy disks, you are wrong. And this is not the only obstacle to familiarization with information.
“The only way to get access to our lawyers’ flash drives is to request permission to review the materials in a special, private section of our legal library. But it can take several days for our review requests to be approved, which is precious time when you are trying to file an appeal. Our prison is severely behind the times. It’s like 1985 at New Jersey State Prison, where we rely on outdated word processors, electric typewriters, and floppy disks that are disappearing in the free world,” Alvarez writes.
Floppy disks are not a commodity that can be freely purchased anywhere. In fact, their mass production stopped in 2011. Earlier, ITC.ua wrote about one of the last floppy disk vendorsas well as about various institutions around the world, mostly state-owned and specialized who still use them. Jorge Luis writes that he has to “buy them from third-party suppliers” (probably even more difficult to do in prison).
“Floppy disks are also easily damaged. After many hours of legal work, you can lose everything in an instant. For this reason, we try to make backups. And most importantly, a floppy disk has only 1.44 MB of memory. One legal note can easily take up the memory of two floppy disks,” the “journalist” continues.
Undoubtedly, those imprisoned for crimes do not necessarily have to be provided with the most modern technology. But in the case of floppy disks in prison, outdated equipment from the last century is severely hampering citizens’ ability to exercise their legal rights. With slightly newer computers and storage media, they could speed up the reading and processing of documents many times over.
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