Creating Technology for Social Change

Charlie DeTar speaks with WNYC’s “The Takeaway” about his prison blogging platform, Between the Bars

Our own Charlie DeTar was interviewed by John Hockenberry today on the WNYC program The Takeaway.

He spoke with Hockenberry about his Center project Between the Bars, a blogging system that helps prisoners document their experiences and maintain outside social ties, which may help lower recidivism rates:

There are more than 1.6 million people currently incarcerated in the United States — and more than 7.3 million people on probation, in jail or on parole. Yet people “on the outside” know very little about what goes on in American prisons. A new website developed by the MIT Media Lab is giving prisoners the opportunity to blog about life in jail.

Charlie DeTar, PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of Between the Bars: Human Stories From Prison, joins us to explain how the project hopes to give prisoners a voice and increase the transparency of the U.S. prison system.