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On Aug. 28, Milwaukee County Judge David Borowski, during a hearing for a defendant charged with triple homicide, learned the defendant had used a county jail-issued tablet to discuss threatening witnesses.
Borowski revoked the defendant’s tablet access and ordered him confined to his cell around the clock. The judge also pointed to two other recent instances in which tablets and laptops had been used in ways detrimental to personal and public safety.
“Why is the sheriff’s department handing laptops or iPads to defendants?” Borowski asked.
The comments soon went viral, picked up by candidates, public relations firms and political influencers. Few explained why tablets and laptops exist in correctional facilities, how common they are across the country or what actually happened in the security lapse. Instead, a nuanced issue was reduced to a single alarming anecdote.
The sheriff’s office would later note that it does not hand out iPads, but rather “pre-programmed devices with limited capabilities.”
Tablets have been used in jails and prisons nationally for well over a decade. They are now used in 48 state prison systems, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and numerous county jails throughout Wisconsin. They were introduced to help incarcerated people communicate with loved ones and access educational programming. Yes, the companies that provide them also profited from poor, disproportionately Black and brown families in the process. See Worth Rises for more information on this issue.
This is how the model works in Milwaukee County: Incarcerated users and their families pay the cost, not taxpayers. Over time, better vendors entered the market, prices dropped and some services became free. What has never changed is that these tablets do not provide internet access. They operate on a controlled intranet system. These cost and access dynamics are why tablets were requested in the first place.
Correctional officials have credited tablets with reducing violence and disturbances inside correctional facilities. Some jurisdictions have reported declines of up to 40%, and the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons described the agency’s tablet program as reducing administrative burdens and allowing staff to focus more on institutional safety, not as a security risk it was forced to accept.
This is not a partisan issue. Some of the nation’s most conservative states have rolled out tablets to every person in custody, regardless of charges or convictions. Sheriffs, who as a group tend to skew conservative, have widely approved their use because those who actually work with incarcerated people understand the benefits they provide.
Responding to the misuse of a few by eliminating a beneficial service for everyone mistakes the appearance of action for the work of actually solving the problem.
Tablets do not inherently create greater opportunities for witness intimidation. They simply create a more visible story when they happen to be the tool used. If tablets disappeared tomorrow, people could still call home, write letters or find other ways to intimidate witnesses.
We do not even know the full story of how this breach occurred.
But tablet security features are more than capable of preventing situations like it. A more useful conversation would focus on identifying and closing the security gap that allowed it.
While I was incarcerated, I had access to a tablet during the final two years of my 17-year sentence. The growth, efficiency and preparation for the real world it gave me as a writer, student, researcher and future employee were light-years beyond what I achieved during the previous 15 years.
Most people do not realize that 90% to 95% of incarcerated people will eventually return home. The only question is who we want them to be when they do.
The nonprofit I founded while incarcerated, The Community, publishes rehabilitative videos, newsletters and podcast episodes that reach more than one million incarcerated people each month through these tablets. The positive feedback and outcomes have been considerable.
But what technology builds, fear can still take away.
I once tried to pay for the language-learning software Rosetta Stone so people inside could learn Spanish. Instead, all of the existing language tapes and CDs were removed because someone unfamiliar with the fact that they had been available for years worried that people might learn another language to plan something illegal.
That episode illustrates how easily a single anecdote — or even a hypothetical possibility — can define the entire conversation, producing a hammer where a screwdriver would do.
As a national advocate for criminal legal system reform, I have many concerns about tablets in jails and prisons, so I do not defend them uncritically. But many outlets covering this incident stopped at the sensational headline instead of doing the reporting the story required. Political candidates and influencers with their own agendas were then given free rein to use the incident as content.
Half a story, told quickly and left uncorrected, leaves the public further from understanding a system it pays dearly for every day.
Wisconsin deserves a justice system more worthy of that name. This episode demonstrates how far we remain from that goal — but also that we know exactly how to get there, if decision-makers take the problem seriously.
Shannon Ross is the founder of The Community and a founding member of the Justice Forward Wisconsin coalition, which prepares incarcerated people for healthier futures, creates opportunities for them and their loved ones and advocates for positive systems change for everyone impacted by the criminal legal system.
Editor’s note: This column was updated to correctly describe the facility where the defendant accused of using a tablet to intimidate witnesses was held.
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