Email – Part 2

Now that I finally have email access, I can’t decide whether it’s a good thing or not. Why?

It’s too expensive!

Imagine giving Microsoft a nickel for every minute you keep Outlook open, and you should see my point. I spend five cents a minute, whether it’s to compose messages or to read mail received. All partial minutes are rounded up. I could easily spend $20.00 a month in email fees in addition to my phone expenses. As a consequence of the high cost, I have to keep messages extremely short:

I ate chicken today.

Didn’t get raped.

Love you, gtg, bye!

     - Joe

That would have cost me a nickel. I don’t DARE use the prison email system for blogging. It takes at least half an hour to write a post, and longer if I want to write something clever. And with my slow typing skills, my debt would soon exceed the national GDP. I can stuff 7 pieces of paper in an envelope, and it only takes a single forever stamp to send it out. Snail mail is clearly superior to 5-cent-per-minute email from a cost perspective when I do my blogging for the week.

And what about the telephone? A 15-minute phone call costs $3.45 (23 cents per minute), but I find this to be cheaper than email since I can convey A LOT more ideas in one minute of speech than one minute of typing. The only bad thing about the phone is that you only get 300 minutes a month. This irks a lot of guys who have wives waiting for them on the outside, and are trying to use the telephone to prop up their marriages. Thankfully, I’m not married.

Let’s look at this another way. Ten bucks will buy 200 minutes of email happiness. If you think that’s an abyss of time, think again. If you have multiple friends with Internet access, you are going to send and receive multiple messages a day. And when your friends first discover you have email access in prison, they’ll gleefully send you every joke of the day, chain letter, and Nigerian pyramid scheme they come across like when you were still on the outside. That email computer is going to eat those 200 minutes like popcorn.

When you think about it, giving inmates email access for a price is an ingenious way for the federal government to make money. Multiply ten bucks a month times the number of inmates in federal prison, and you have a number akin to what Blizzard makes on THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT.

Maybe they should change the name of the system from Trulincs to The World of Email, or maybe Feloncraft. I dunno.

Bottom line: Email access in prison is neat, but like everything else here, it comes at a price. If you’re rich, go hog wild. If not, ration it like the telephone. Email is great for short messages that you want to send in a hurry, but novel length letters will break your wallet. Be frugal, and exercise common sense according to your budget.