By: Bent Dahle Hansen and Paal Chr Breivik, the County Governor of Hordaland
By the end of 2009, 25 prisons will have access to Internet through a national network. By the end of 2010 the rest of the Norwegian prisons will join the network. In the following we will discuss the background for this revolution and describe how this Internet works.
According to the educational and the sentence act, all prisoners in Norway have a legal right to education. The use of digital tools (internet is described as a digital tool) is an integrated part of the competence aim in the Norwegian subject curriculum. Access to the internet is also becoming necessary in connection with exams; both in preparing for exams and in writing exam papers.
We aim at giving access to all sites relevant for educational reasons. The internet also has many sites that we don’t want the prisoner to see. And the web contains many different ways to communicate. These are the main challenges in the prison. We also have to deal with surveillance of all traffic.
The solution is based on an internet divided in categories. An international company is responsible for putting websites in categories. For example: the CNN website would be in the news category and the Google website would be in the category of search engines. There are in all over one hundred categories. Among them you will find categories dedicated to education, sports, travel but also to porn, arms and drugs.
The internet that prisoners in high security have access to is restricted to categories that are considered safe. Websites that are not categorized are blocked. In addition to the allowed categories there is a communication filter that blocks attempts to send messages out. To make this filter fully effective, all plug-ins are blocked. This makes the internet less interactive and is said by some to be the paper version of the internet.
To make the internet more useful we make exceptions to the strict communication filter. We open up for interaction with pedagogical websites by turning on scripts, plug-ins or other features that block the interactivity. This interactivity is communication with a website and not with people outside the prison wall. This kind of interactivity is therefore considered safe.
Prisoners in a prison with low security are allowed more categories and are allowed an internet without the communication filter. This allows the prisoners to follow the normal school outside the prison walls using the learning management system (LMS) of the school outside.
All prisons are connected to a national centre. From this centre, the correctional service controls the internet traffic, users and computers. When a computer enters the IFI domain (network) strong policies are locking the computer down to restrict unauthorized access to the internet.
The centre logs who has been surfing, what the prisoner has been viewing, what time he visited each website and on what computer he sat when he visited that website. Even though the centre carries out the logging, it is the local security officer at the local prison who reads the logs. The local prison officer has knowledge of the prisoners and will know who needs special security attention.
The IFI solution has been developed over several years in close cooperation between the correctional services and the education authorities.
The Norwegians showing us how it can be done; more importantly that it can be done!
ReplyDeleteBB: I write a regular column called PSO Watch which examines Prison Service Orders. In the same edition I criticised that some information which affects prisoners is not available in hard copy in the prison libraries, being only available on the intranet. I concluded the piece with this: "It may be that a court would be sympathetic to a legal challenge; arguing that prisoners be allowed limited access to the internet so that they can be better informed?".
ReplyDeleteThe MoJ really has no excuse now for not following suit. I will get onto the DG of NOMS after the holiday and make him aware of what Norway is doing. He will have to investigate the security issues, but as you say the Norwegians have managed it ok.
Yes they have managed it, putting in place a very sensible system of monitoring as well, our own politicians could do with looking across the North Sea.
ReplyDeleteAs the government puts more and more stuff on the internet so proper access to it becomes important; regardless of one's position in society.