- Nj -prisoners get only twenty 1.44 mb floppy disk, barely enough for appeals
- Attorneys need to transfer files from flash drives back to the floppy disk that complicating the process
- Authorities say the ban on flash drive is a matter of security
A prisoner in New Jersey State Prison has a public expression of frustration over being forced to rely on floppy disks for critical legal work.
The US State’s prison system limits inmates to using floppy disks, each with a maximum capacity of 1.44 MB, but each prisoner is allowed 20 floppy disk, a limit that hardly matches the needs of complex legal correspondence.
When he wrote to Prison Journalism Project, Jorge Luis Alvarado said: “Inside the New Jersey State Prison, it’s like 1985, when we rely on outdated word processors, electric typewriters and floppy disks that go out into the free world.”
Alvarado explains that even a single legal card can exceed this size, which requires the use of multiple disks to save a document.
Such a process becomes cumbersome and with the extra risk of corruption, the format introduces real uncertainty into how files are preserved.
Since larger companies like Sony stopped manufacturing floppies for approx. 15 years ago, their scarcity only adds to the impracticalness only.
The addiction to floppy media seems particularly arbitrary, as they have only about a year’s life left and that flash drive was widely adopted more than two decades ago.
In the early 2000s, USB quickly eclpped and offers both speed and durability.
Today, they are cheap, compact and reliable with capacity that far exceeds everything that the floppy era could give.
Even consumer SSD settings now range into the Terabyte series, with the largest SSD models competing with business storage.
Devices that were once labeled the fastest SSD can manage transfers that dwarves everything with older media.
However, the authorities claim that the ban on flash drive is a matter of security, which suggests that they could be abused in prison environments.
While this attitude explains the reluctance to modernize, leaving it is disadvantaged when dealing with legal issues where technology should serve as a bridge, not a barrier.
Alvarado describes a process in which lawyers have to copy digital files on flash drive, only to get them transferred to floppy disks through a single library computer.
Delays are inevitable with access that often takes days at a time.
Some scientists estimate that between four and six percent of these prisoners in the United States may be innocent.
Therefore, even if a fraction of these individuals faces barriers to appeals due to outdated technology, the question extends far beyond pure disadvantage.
Via Toms hardware
