My Fear of Incarceration and Re-Entry During the Technology Boom

Apps...apps...apps! I mean, there's an app for everything! Obviously there are few that are as life changing as Flikshop (hey, what do you expect?), but if you want to buy a house there's the Zillow App. If you want to lose weight there's the Lose It! App. Even if you want to save a few bucks around town, you can get some of what the city has to offer on the cheap via the Groupon App. Its our new way of living. If you want something fast, you can get it done with your smartphone.

These guys that have been incarcerated since 1993 have no idea of how to use these devices. (If we're honest with ourselves, secretly some of us don't know how to cut off the alarm on our iPhone's in the morning.) More importantly, the idea of fast-paced information delivery will be completely foreign and intimidating for most of our guys that have served more than 15 years in prison and are going to be eventually released.

I know that when I came home in 2004 it was hard to grasp that if I typed anything into Google it would really yield a real result. But wait...it was even information overload for me; I hadn't been adequately trained to know that NOBODY goes past the second page of Google search results. When my friend Spida comes home he will be faced with the largest disparity of information imbalance that has ever been witnessed by an inmate coming home from prison.

Never before in history has life in every community been impacted by technology development, creation of major devices, and improvement in concept-to-delivery timelines. Labor is cheaper and computing has become an increasingly smarter instrument to use when building ANYTHING! Jobs are expecting Spida to know things that he's never heard of, and probably couldn't even conceptualize...all due to the lack of exposure to it. There aren't any real technology programs that Spida will have the opportunity to graduate from in prison, because tech is the largest threat to security that any government will stand on.

My fear; my fellas are being imprisoned in there for decades and will feel imprisoned to their own insecurities that the world is proving to be paramount when they're released.

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