Inmates in U.S. using intermediaries to escape into Internet

State and federal prisons don't let inmates use the Internet. Neither do many county jails. But that hasn't stopped Maydak and thousands of other inmates across the United States from having their own websites.

Using their telephone and mail privileges, plus a network of family, friends or activists, inmates are contributing to websites to plead their case, pillory prosecutors or find pen pals.

Maydak, 34, of North Versailles became a computer bulletin board devotee after seeing the 1983 movie War Games.

He spent seven years in federal prison for a telephone scam that federal prosecutors say cost AT&T $550,000. He is jailed on a probation violation and is awaiting sentencing. From his Allegheny County Jail cell, he uses a network of toll-free numbers he controls and a group of friends to relay phone and e-mail messages. He also has a website, "Why is Keith Maydak in Jail?"

Joe Weedon, a spokesman for the American Correctional Association in Lanham, Md., said prisons keep inmates away from the Internet primarily for security reasons.

"There were a few jurisdictions that allowed it on a limited basis, but they ran into problems with offenders contacting their victims or inmates running scams of some sort," Weedon said.

Federal appeals courts haven't heard a major case on inmate Internet access, but victims' advocates promise to fight them.

"Your rights are very limited when you go to prison and certainly the right to communicate with people on the Internet is one of them," said Michael Rushford of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

In 2000, inmates successfully fought an Arizona law that prohibited helping inmates to access the Internet and punished those who transmitted items to someone for posting on the web. The law was passed after a murder victim's family complained about the killer's Internet pen pal ad. A federal district judge struck down the law in 2003.

The American Civil Liberties Union pursued that case on behalf of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The group publishes websites for about 500 U.S. death row inmates, and pen pal solicitations for about 700 more, said co-founder Tracy Lamourie.

"They're sentenced to death. They're not sentenced to silence," Lamourie said. "Even if just one was (innocent), how can we silence someone who's going to be killed in our name?"

Lamourie's group maintained a site for Juan Melendez, 53, who spent 18 years on Florida's death row before he was found to be wrongfully convicted three years ago.

Lamourie and her partner pay for envelopes, stationery and postage out of pocket or with donations. The server space for the web pages is donated by a European death penalty opponent.

"I try to understand how alarming it would be for a victims' family to see the smiling face of an inmate who has caused some great harm to a family on the World Wide Web looking for women to write to him," said Donna Hamm of Middle Ground Prison Reform Inc., an Arizona inmate rights group. "But it's difficult to imagine how that infringes on a free world person's right to put something on the Internet."

One inmate's website is at the centre of a death penalty appeal in Connecticut.

Serial killer Michael Ross has volunteered to be executed. Those trying to stop him said Ross decided to end his appeals only after his former fiancee broke up with him in 2002 - cutting off his access to the outside world through a website she ran.

These days, jails and prisons are trying to take advantage of Internet technology without letting inmates abuse it.

Arkansas prison officials recently OK'd an Internet banking system to let people send inmates money. Alabama officials are installing law library computers to give inmates better access to court rulings, but no Internet or e-mail access.

Such outreach programs sometimes backfire. Several inmates at the Weld County Jail in Greeley, Colo., are suspected of using jail library computers to access
Social Security numbers and other personal information of county employees.