Blogging behind bars

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 de Tar, 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.