This Communicating with Prisoners ortext is an experimental approach to public understanding of the public importance of communicating with prisoners. It’s an ortext because it isn’t a traditional scholarly article, policy report, or popular book. It’s a large collection of loosely connected images, text, data, and references. You can enter into it from many different points. From any entry point, we hope that you will continually go deeper.

Start from whatever piece of this work speaks to you. Explore further. Consider how you can communicate with prisoners. Act in whatever way you decide to be appropriate to recognize the humanity of prisoners and to make the criminal justice system more just and more humane.

This ortext is freely available to everyone to consider, share, adapt, improve, and use for good. Its authors release any copyrights they hold in it under a CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. You can find updates, announcements, and other news concerning this ortext and associated code at the news page. A feed for this ortext’s news is available to help you keep abreast of any developments. There is also a change log.

The authors welcome others to submit substantive analysis, corrections, and further information as comments on the relevant pages. Comments must be submitted only with an understood public domain dedication for the comment. That’s so as not to impair free distribution of this work. Comments being in the public domain also allows use of helpful comments in revisions of this work.

Use this work for good, not for evil. Please include a linked reference back to the relevant part of this ortext when you use content from it. That will help others to access improved, updated, or corrected versions that might appear in the future.

The photos of prisoners that appear in this work we collected from public postings on the web. The only substantive criteria used for the prisoner photo collection was to have photos roughly representative of the sex, race, and ethnicities of prisoners in the U.S. The photos are randomly chosen and inserted dynamically for each viewed content page. The prisoners’ photos represent the importance of personal communication with prisoners. They have no other intrinsic relation to the content that appears below them. If a picture of you appears in this work, and you do not want it to appear, contact the authors. They will seriously consider your claim, respond to you sympathetically, and act appropriately.

In replicating and redistributing this work, you need to consider others’ rights and your responsibilities to them. For example, the photos of prisoners included in this work are important to its public purpose of encouraging thinking about communicating with prisoners. Those images don’t have public-domain status under copyright law worldwide. You should not use those images or images of any other person in a way that is legally or morally wrong. You are responsible for your use of this work.

We built this ortext with the wonderful open-source software WordPress. All the code and content are freely available for you to replicate this ortext and make your own ortext. We encourage you to experiment with this ortext. Think about how to share knowledge in ways that go beyond the legacy forms of traditional scholarly articles, policy reports, and popular books.

For some inspiration for innovation, consider Matthew Butterick’s open-source tool Pollen. Compared to this ortext, Pollen provides a much more sophisticated experimental system for building web-based books. Butterick has also provided insightful evidence and analysis of the economics of a pioneering web-based book. We encourage you to consider the work of Butterick and others in thinking about experiments with this ortext.

You have astonishingly powerful communication tools freely available to you. Use them to promote knowledge and humane civilization.