New site design

Between the Bars has been busy in the last six months:

• We now have over 300 writers, and are regularly receiving 100 letters per week
• We've published over 1500 blog posts and profiles.
• We now have a paid part-time staff person, thanks to the Center for Civic Media's support, to help us with operations
• We've accrued a wait-list of over 500 additional writers in prison who want to blog - and we're working on growing our capacity to publish them as well.

This is still a far cry from the 2.3 million people in prison right now.  So clearly, we have our work cut out for us!

So it is with this in mind that we're delighted to announce some major changes to the Between the Bars website!  View them here:  http://betweenthebars.org

In addition to a fresh new look, we're sporting some great new features. You can now subscribe to particular authors' blogs, or to categories of posts, via email.  You can also get notifications when authors respond to your comments.  We also have a new "featured posts" section on the front page, which is part of our growing initiative to start making the amazing corpus of letters that we add to each week more accessible.

But more importantly, we're very excited by the back-end changes to the site which will greatly increase our capacity to publish more work.  In addition to making the workflow of turning letters into blog posts more efficient, we're now better set up to take on additional volunteer help from friends, family members and supporters of people in prison - anyone with a computer will be able to help.  Over the next few months we will be working hard to get more people involved in publishing.

Between the Bars is Back!

Between the Bars is back online!  We'll be adding more authors in the coming weeks as more people get back to us.  Thanks to everyone who has helped us out getting this far.  We'll be sending our first batch of printouts back to the authors this Monday, so get in there and join the conversation.

We've also added an FAQ and Community Guidelines for commenting and transcribing posts. 

Tentative Launch Date: April 1

Today we mailed out 394 letters to former and future bloggers in prison whom we'd been introduced to over the last 6 months, inviting them to start writing for us again.  This is Between the Bars' largest mailing yet - and it was a great learning experience.  We decided to make use of MIT's Mail Services and their fancy machines for folding and stuffing the envelopes - and also learned, the hard way, that they required that the 2000 pages we provided for the mailing be uncollated. :)  As we grow, we may make heavier use of the mail stuffing robots to handle our outgoing correspondence.

With that out of the way, we now have a tentative date for relaunching Between the Bars:  April 1!  As soon as we start getting mail and blog posts back from people in prison, we'll bring the site online again.

We're also taking the opportunity to do some upgrades to the software.  One major new feature is support for profile pages.  Profiles on Between the Bars will be a single 8.5x11 scanned page that can include any photos, drawings, addresses, or any other info the blogger wants to include, and can also be transcribed like blog posts.  Unlike blog posts, they won't enter the blog roll or RSS feeds, and will remain in place until the author changes them.

What Happened?

So why was Between the Bars offline for three months?

Between the Bars was originally conceived as a service project. Our primary aim has always been to provide a valuable communication service to the incarcerated.  Since the service was started by a couple of PhD students who have things like studies and research on the brain, we also designed a research protocol that would allow us to reflect on how people used the service, to use those results to improve the service, and to tell other researchers in the academic community about the results.  In retrospect, this wasn't the best idea.

There are important, worthwhile, and necessary regulations that exist for any research with humans, especially if it involves prisoners - this is due to a regrettable history of people in universities using prisoners as convenient pincushions for their experiments. Before starting Between the Bars, we completed a full review by the auspiciously named MIT Committee for the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (MIT's Institutional Review Board) to ensure that we would be protecting prisoners' interests at all times, and operating fully within the law.  The process was valuable to us: it helped us to sharpen our approach to ensure that we wouldn't be creating an attractive nuisance through which people might get in or cause trouble.

Despite having completed a full review, in mid-December 2010, we became aware of regulations that might impact the research protocol. At MIT's request, to ensure that we remained within the law, we suspended the service in order to re-evaluate, and began a lengthy series of meetings with various groups in the MIT administration to determine the project's fate.  In the end, we concluded that it was not feasible to continue the project with any research component without drastically reducing our scope, and letting many writers down.  The long down-time was necessary in order for us to reach the needed agreements with MIT, to make appropriate changes to the service, and to ensure that we could continue in full compliance with laws and regulations.

So really, we're back to what we started with in the beginning, and operating in a much more suitable fashion: Between the Bars is a service project through and through, and no longer has any research component.  We're operating with full support of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and the MIT Public Service Center.  We believe that this has left us better able to grow and adapt, and better situated us to fight the long fight of challenging injustice in the prison system through truth and humanity.

Restarting Service

After what seems like an eternity, we're delighted to report that the long road to restarting the website has crossed its final administrative hurdle! Between the Bars will be restarting service (with some changes) in the next few weeks. We're frantically working right now on making the necessary changes to our process and software, as well as catching up on the last few months of stalled correspondence.

At this time we're not yet set up to accept new writer registrations or blog posts, but we'll be there soon.

More to come (including a full explanation of what happened)!

We're also working on building a base of volunteers in the Boston/Cambridge, MA area to help with Between the Bars. If you're interested in joining us, please contact volunteer@betweenthebars.org.

If you'd like to be notified in advance of our re-launch and kept up-to-date, susbscribe to our mailing list!