What Happened When “Streaming” Came to My Prison

This is part of Time, Online, a Future Tense series on how technology is changing prison.

In 2021, while watching a Super Bowl commercial on a TV bolted to the wall of a cell block, I saw something I had never seen before. A checkered black-and-white square appeared at the center of the screen. The weird little square—which I now understand was a QR code—made no sense to me or my incarcerated peers, and no one from the commercial was explaining it. I vaguely recalled seeing similar symbols in magazines and on some products from the prison canteen, but not what they were for.

When I finally asked a friend on the outside about the mysterious symbol, she explained that people took pictures of it to gain access to information. I felt ignorant and out of touch. My primary source for information about tech in the outside world—TV commercials—had failed me.

For more than 25 years, I’ve been in prison, where TV is a staple of prison life as essential as staff and more immutable than any rehabilitative program. Cell-block televisions are equal parts library, time machine, and mecca, instructing the incarcerated in the ways of the world they aspire to return to. Movies, TV shows, the news, and commercials are polished snapshots of reality. But in prison, they are consumed as gospel.

Traditionally, most prisons have a communal TV, though some also sell personal TV sets. In every prison I’ve been in, the communal TV is placed in the day room, with tables and chairs nearby. Popular TV events like the Super Bowl can create a real sense of community. People prepare snacks with food from the canteen; there is laughing, shouting, arguing, cursing, and shared enjoyment of whatever plays out on the screen.

But the spaces around communal TV sets can also fill with tension over who controls what shows come on. Some prisons maintain a TV schedule controlled by guards; in other facilities, the schedule is determined by the incarcerated residents themselves, through democracy or dictatorship. Some of the more violent fights in prison stem from conflict over who controls the TV.

Still, for prison officials, the TV is a crucial resource: It pacifies bored, unruly prisoners who might create mischief without work or programs, and it’s much cheaper and easier to implement than more stimulating activities, like college classes, extended visiting hours, or longer outdoor recreation periods, all of which require staff. And while TV is often viewed as mindless entertainment, a number of shows and movies have become staples for me over the years, sometimes even creating a sense of routine.

Before the pandemic, when I shared a cell block with my friends Squirrel and Gilby, we always watched the nightly news together, a ritual that Squirrel called our family time. We commented on various stories, sometimes argued, teased one another, and shared food. Other friends had similar rituals, gathering for shows like The Walking Dead, or for the March Madness tournament. They too shared time and space together, bonding over the TV.

Then, streaming came to prison. In 2020 the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections began distributing tablets in my facility through a contract with the prison telecommunications giant ViaPath (formerly known as GTL). The tablets connect with a server that contains a limited number of movies and TV shows, which are preapproved and edited so curse words are altered and characters who show too much skin are blurred out. There are lots of superhero movies, and they don’t venture beyond PG-13. The content is rarely updated, and the system also has chronically frustrating connectivity issues. Still, between movies, TV, music, video games, messaging, and free educational resources, there was enough content to suck people in.

When tablets were passed out in my facility, prison day rooms—the places where people once gathered to watch TV, play cards, use the communal phone, get medicine from med techs, and eat—started to empty. In my facility, many people voluntarily locked themselves in their cells, absorbed in their tablets. If anyone did hang out in the day room, it was because the Wi-Fi was down, the tablet had run out of battery or minutes, or they wanted to watch things not available on the tablet (soap operas, for example, or local news and sporting events).

Tablets eliminated the need to be around others, wait in line to use the phone, or grit your teeth and bear whatever was on the communal TV, because it was the only form of entertainment available. Whereas before I might have planned my day around a particular TV show, now my day is planned around the tablet’s battery life, which lasts about six hours. If I want to watch a movie in the middle of the day, I can. If I want to play video games for a while, I will. If those things don’t appeal to me, then I can watch free educational videos, but they so seldom function it seems to drive people to entertainment apps by design.

This comes at a price. In North Carolina, most activities on the tablet are charged per minute of use. A 1,500-minute bundle that includes news apps, podcasts, and music is $15, while a 500-minute bundle that has older movies, games, and a messaging app is $10. Both must be used in 30 days. Accessing some content, including the newest movies, requires a Premium Access Pass, which costs $8 for 200 minutes and expires in four days. If you’re lucky, this pass will get you two movies—which, as a North Carolina prisoner making 40 cents a day for janitorial or kitchen work, would take 20 days to earn. The prices have risen twice in the year and a half since we got the tablets and reflect an obvious intent to target the family and friends of the incarcerated.

To be clear, the tablets don’t stream content from the internet. The entertainment and education apps are carefully curated and provide a limited amount of largely static content. Newly released “premium” movies are partially rotated about once every 45 days. Some of the news apps rotate articles a few times a day, pulling from sites like NPR, MSNBC, Fox, Vice, ESPN, and TMZ, to name a few. While there is a lot of content on the tablet, it doesn’t take long for it to grow stale, or at least not worth paying for when the TV is free and doesn’t run out of battery life.

Traditional TV has another advantage over the tablets, which is that it constantly streams new audio and visual content—from breaking news updates on the network channels to local stories on affiliate stations, as well as national and world events. The tablets could not have adequately covered the video footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Nor would they provide local coverage on the death penalty, or the impact of a particular hurricane on Raleigh.

I grew up in the 1980s, when computers weren’t the household staples they are today, so it’s easy for me to feel nostalgic about TV. When I was arrested and jailed in 1997, I had never been on the internet. Cellphones were still uncommon. Everything I would go on to learn about Y2K, Wi-Fi, broadband internet, laptops, USB ports, touch screens, and social media came from watching TV commercials and shows in a prison day room. After we received access to the phone on death row in 2016, I often found myself quoting the Verizon commercial: “Can you hear me now? Good!”

But learning through a screen has its limits. The first time I saw an iPhone in person, beyond commercials or TV shows flashing the alien device, was before a play several of us were going to put on as part of a rehabilitative program. Dr. K hooked the device up to a boombox with a power cord, touched the screen in a few places to cue some music, and then left on a brief errand. The screen went dark, but the music kept playing. After a while, the music repeated in a loop, and we gathered around the iPhone—but none of us dared touch it; there were no visible buttons. So we stood there, paralyzed by our technological ignorance, for a full five minutes.

That’s how Dr. K found us. He asked what we were doing, and we explained the problem. He picked up the phone, touched it, and brought the screen back to life, changing the music. It was both humbling and embarrassing.

When the touch-screen tablets arrived, I remembered the close encounter with the iPhone and my embarrassment. When we gather around a tablet these days, it’s to share the cost of a newly released movie like Dune or Creed III, to give one another tips on video games like Angry Birds, or to show off pictures from family and friends. For all their flaws, the tablets contextualized some of the technology we had seen on TV and longed to experience. That tech used to feel like science fiction. Now it feels like reality.