The tag line on the website Between the Bars, a blogging platform for the outside world to communicate with prisoners, is a simple request that packs so much punch:

Leave a comment….we’ll pass it on.

Behind the scenes, Between the Bars is an intense—and difficult to scale—operation. Five core volunteers open mail, yes, that old form of communication printed on paper and sent in an envelope, coming from prisoners who participate in the program. They scan and publish the letters to their website, where the rest of the world can take a look and choose whether or not to respond.

Charlie DeTar is the MIT graduate student who co-founded the effort, a project of the Knight-funded Center for Civic Media,  and has since kept it going. He calls it addicting to witness the connections that happen between a very marginalized part of our population and the outside world. He hopes some good can come from raising awareness of the failures in our criminal system that result in broken lives rather than ones that are rehabilitated.

“You start realizing that the person who’s been put in prison is somebody who could be doing so much more for society, so much more for themselves and be harmed so much less by some other means of dealing with criminality. That’s the thing we want to influence. We want to interrupt that process.”

This mail-to-internet-to-mail system is often an inmate’s first experience with any kind of online expression of themselves or meaningful participation in a digital world.

“A lot of the people in prison who are writing for our site have been in there for a long time, and they may have missed the internet, they may have never been exposed to this sort of thing,” DeTar says. In the letters he reads, he recognizes a desire for each prisoner to get some human interaction outside of the prison environment.

For example, a recent post by Allan Lummus read: “Father’s Day is a reminder of my most severe punishment – denial of face to face contact with my son. Sure we can write and phone, but the lack of day to day interaction and presence is a whole [sic] that cannot be filled. Father’s Day along with Thanksgiving, birthdays and other holidays are moments of family life that are held tenderly.”

A letter traveling through the prison postal system takes about twice as long to deliver as a first class letter, so there is no immediate gratification in this process. But some prisons are beginning to implement an email service for prisoners, kiosk style, and charging a fee for each message. The easier communicating can be, the better chance for a prisoner to feel connected.

“We’ve lost a lot of patience for writing out a letter long form,” DeTar says, explaining that prison pen pal services have seen this as a challenge. Ease of use is what’s attracting people to DeTar’s service. “[Connecting online] is just so much more efficient and easy,“ he says.

By using a blogging platform not just to connect individuals but as a way to broadcast reports from within prison walls, DeTar hopes to expose the serious inequalities he believes are a result of a justice system that has a heavy impact on the country’s poor, black population, where one out of every three males can expect to spend some time behind bars.

“When you start looking at who actually gets charged with crimes and who gets sent to prison and conversely who gets off,” DeTar says, “you start realizing that it is really an issue about race and economics, rather than just an issue of criminality.“

Annie Shreffler is a freelance writer who wrote this post for KnightBlog.org.  Read more about Center for Civic Media projects here.