The United States has a prison problem—namely, the largest prison population in the world the second-highest per-capita incarceration rate. These statistics are partly what inspired me to speak with topher Grewe, the CEO founder of American ison Data Systems, or AS.

Grewe may not be an Android developer, or even a die-hard Android user, but what he’s doing with Android tablets in the U.S. prison system is remarkable.

The concept is simple: Seed inmates with feature-limited Galaxy Tab S2s. The inmates typically have access to only educational vocational apps, through in some cases they can use the tablets to read ebooks, prepare for upcoming court cases, or communicate with family members. “ provide technology solutions that provide better outcomes for the incarcerated,” Grewe said at the beginning of our interview. “isons don’t need to be dangerous places. They can be constructive.”

: How did you decide on Android tablets?

Grewe: If you bring in anything, whether it’s a pencil or a piece of paper, the first concern is whether you can use it to hurt somebody. So we needed to look at the physical form factor of the devices, that’s why we settled on a tablet. They don’t have any peripherals, like a mouse or keyboard; they can be made physically safe. In our case, we’ve done that by developing a specific kind of enclosure for the tablets to tackle physical safety.

AS

Android tablets can be manufactured in lots of different ways, they’re inherently cheaper. They’re not perceived as luxury items anymore, that helps. It’s also an open architecture, which is really important because we cannot allow our tablets to function in the correctional institution the way tablets function for consumers. Apple some others build devices to delight the end-user. ’re happy to delight people, but safety comes first.  also decided on Android because we knew we wanted a tablet that was inherently simple, safe, an effective platform for delivering content.

Then we had to look at Android versus iOS whatever else might be out there, very quickly decided that Android is the way of the future. It’s a nice balance between being stable, always improving, open, so you can muck around in there for safety reasons.

: How did you tweak the Android OS so that it’s safe for inmates to use?

Grewe: needed to make sure that incarcerated people can have access to all the good things that the Internet the digital world can provide, but we can’t allow the bad things that people are terrified about. don’t want an inmate to use a digital device to contact a former victim, to intimidate a witness, to engage in continual criminal activity, or to do anything that would allow them to impair the safety of the jail or prison.

also have human beings in Clevel, OH who monitor our devices, so when a device [sends an alert], there is someone paying attention. It works both ways. If, for some reason, a warden said they wanted all those devices turned off, they can dial a number, we’ll remotely turn them all off.

A lot of our theory of what to do with the technology was to take things that exist off the shelf customize them to this particular use case. ’re now at version 2.0, we’re building version 3.0. I’m thrilled to say that we’ve had more than three million personnel hours of use on the tablets not a single digital safety issue. No one’s ever gotten to a website they weren’t supposed to.

a Suzuki at The San Francisco Chronicle

: So how do the inmates actually get on the Internet?

Grewe: The vast majority of the tablets connect only over Verizon’s 4G E cellular data network. In many of the places we go, even a relatively hardened institution, we walk in there’s more than enough ambient signal from Verizon’s network. The worst case scenario is we use a repeater.

’ve intentionally disabled -Fi, we’ve done that for a variety of reasons, but it ultimately comes down to safety security. It also has to do with the needs of our end-users in the prisons. -Fi requires installing a lot of infrastructure. Nobody likes installing cable, prisons really hate it.

: How have the inmates reacted?

Grewe: A couple of months ago, we were deploying at Rikers isl. One of the young men went back to his bed—it was more like a basketball court with 50 bunks bolted to the floor— he started crying. There were a lot of people there one of the very senior people of public corrections went to him asked, “y are you crying?” The kid said, “This is the first time in a long time that I felt like someone was treating me like a human being.”

It’s hard to underst how important technology is to young urban kids. For a lot of these kids, that was their whole life: texting, playing games, listening to music. Being able to give them some of that back in a constructive way makes them happy, helps improve their behavior, makes the institution safer. That makes a lot of things possible.

: at do you say to skeptics who believe that equipping prisoners with tablets is simply rewarding them for bad behavior?

Grewe: There’s a well-known principle in psychology called the gifting effect. Even if you gift somebody something really small, it predisposes them to give back, we’re seeing that.

Technology has improved every aspect of our lives in the last decade. This is one of the very few places it hasn’t touched yet, or had all the impact. I’m very thankful to Android developers—they have created a little bit of an erector set for the technologists so that we can adapt very easily to new end-user’s use cases.

: at’s next for the program?

Grewe: Our next stage is Chromebooks—not for every individual quite yet, but you can imagine an institution where there are 500 individuals, all who have a tablet, then there’s a room where there are 25 Chromebooks that you can sign out when you need them for things like learning a foreign language. It’s beautiful for us that those architectures can play nicely together.

: at was your first Android device?

Grewe: I had a friend who was developing a product called MM. The first Android device I ever held was a prototype of something he was building. And then I adopted Android tablets pretty quickly.

: If you could only have one app installed on your phone, what would it be?

Grewe: I’m really dependent on Uber. It’s the one app I use almost every day.