As an American, you have the right of habeas corpus, meaning that you can contest your imprisonment if you feel it is unlawful. The problem is that, despite around 1 in every 100 people in the U.S. currently being imprisoned, we don’t really like to give them anything. We already tried you once — why would we give you another go just because your judge was provably senile when you were sentenced?

This has resulted in a system in which prisoners are denied basic things like air conditioning, decent food and, apparently, the materials to review the cases that brought them there in the first place. This issue has come to a head once more after Jorge Luis Alvarado, writing for the Prison Journalism Project, explained how it was difficult to keep up-to-date on his case because lawyers tend to send documents on flash drives — which are not allowed by the New Jersey state prison system.

And so, all documents must be separated out onto floppy disks, of which there is a 20 disk limit. From there, someone who is imprisoned must wait until they have access to a computer, which can take days (a problem given how time sensitive legal appeals can be).

Making matters worse is that, with all these unreliable floppy disks changing hands, data often gets corrupted. This means that those who are imprisoned have to figure out whether they want to use their 20 disks on their case and hope to whoever’s up there that one of them doesn’t get corrupted, or use just 10 and have at least one backup of each.

I think it’s time we allow people who are imprisoned to get with the modern era — the “modern era” being the year 2000.