Says Samantha Melamed at Philly.com:
Book deliveries to prisons across Pennsylvania were terminated this month as part of a multi-pronged security overhaul meant to eliminate avenues for drug smuggling. That meant an abrupt end to direct donations from programs like Books Through Bars, as well as orders shipped from Amazon or publishers.
But even though prisoners in Pennsylvania can't get books in the mail anymore, they can get access to "a library of 8,500 e-books that inmates, who make as little as 19 cents per hour, can purchase and read on $149 tablets provided by the vendor GTL." That's almost 800 hours of work to buy a tablet that gives them the ability to buy more books. This is totally immoral.