South Carolina prisoners are given years in solitary for using Facebook

Facebook is causing serious problems for South Carolina's prison population. An investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation has found hundreds of prisoners in South Carolina that have been sentenced to solitary confinement for posting to Facebook from contraband phones. Those sentences can easily ballooned to ridiculous levels, sentencing one prisoner to the equivalent of 37 years of solitary, together with the equivalent of 74 years of lost visitation rights, for a total of 38 Facebook posts. Because of a given prisoner's sentence, the effective length of the punishment is often much shorter, but it still stands as a stark punishment for services many outsiders take for granted.