New Jersey Jail Offers Inmates Online Legal Aid
HACKENSACK, N.J. — Bergen County Jail inmates can now research their legal cases on laptops from their jail cells after county officials introduced an intranet legal aid system.
The first consignment of ultra-mini laptop computers, which are about the size and weight of a hardback novel, were made available to some of the approximately 1,000 inmates at the county jail.
The program, which has cost about $100,000 thus far, was prompted by facility overcrowding issues and increased safety and security concerns, officials say.
Prior to the laptop program, inmates could only access the Westlaw research service on one of 12 jail computer terminals shoe-horned between stacks of the jail’s cramped law library, officials say.
The county jail has seen an increasing number of individuals being detained on immigration-related charges, officials say. With judges tending to grant such citizenship and immigration detainees more law library and legal research privileges than other inmate classifications, the demand and the waiting lines for law library facilities, such as the legal research computer terminals, has steadily increased, officials say.
Running on a secure internal network system that does not permit access to the Internet, the mini PCs allow inmates to conduct legal research via the Westlaw research service for their cases.
Inmates merely need to place an advance request for the laptop to be delivered to their cell, much like meal service or a mobile library for reading materials. The program is funded by profits generated from the sale of personal items and snacks to inmates held in the facility while awaiting court appearances.
Jail officials made more than 12 of the laptops available to start the program, with an additional 75 machines slated to be introduced in phases during the coming months.
Once all 80 computers are operational, several of the machines will be distributed to each of the jail’s 13 individual units, which each house an average of 65 inmates.