Okay iMore Nation.... you are the best collective brain-trust out there for stuff like this... so I'm hoping you have ideas....
I'm a defense attorney. Everyone hates 'em until they need one. Some of the people who need me are in jail. One of the biggest pains in the butt for defense attorneys is running to the jail (or various jails) to meet with clients who are "in-custody". Some jails allow "video visits" where you show up at the jail and they seat you in a cubicle and the guard calls up to whatever labyrinthine floor of the jail your client is on and tells the guard on that unit that the client has a video-visit... the client sits down and has a camera on him and they connect you via a phone handset so that you can see and hear your client.
What I would like to do is go one step further.... I'd like to be able to do
"video visits" from my office. If we (and maybe a bunch of defense attorneys in a co-op style agreement) who have iPads (or Mac's or iPhones, for that matter) could purchase iPads for the various floors of the jail, and somehow secure them, we could save a TON of time and also improve responsiveness to clients who are in-custody and often feel (and in fact, are) cut-off from the outside world and their legal service providers. Now, obviously, there are security issues here.... you can't just hand a defendant an iPad and say "knock yourself out"... they'll start surfing the web and use FaceTime to call people they're not supposed to, etc. They also sometimes do NOT like what their attorney is telling them, so there's the possibility that they could get pi**ed off and slam the iPad around or even try to destroy it. What we need is a case such that corrections staff could just press the "accept" or "answer" button and then lock it back up so that the client couldn't manipulate it... just talk to the caller that the corrections staff allows. So it has to be able to be locked up and secure and also protect the iPad from angry clients trying to damage it.
If anyone has brilliant ideas about how this could work, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks!
I'm a defense attorney. Everyone hates 'em until they need one. Some of the people who need me are in jail. One of the biggest pains in the butt for defense attorneys is running to the jail (or various jails) to meet with clients who are "in-custody". Some jails allow "video visits" where you show up at the jail and they seat you in a cubicle and the guard calls up to whatever labyrinthine floor of the jail your client is on and tells the guard on that unit that the client has a video-visit... the client sits down and has a camera on him and they connect you via a phone handset so that you can see and hear your client.
What I would like to do is go one step further.... I'd like to be able to do
"video visits" from my office. If we (and maybe a bunch of defense attorneys in a co-op style agreement) who have iPads (or Mac's or iPhones, for that matter) could purchase iPads for the various floors of the jail, and somehow secure them, we could save a TON of time and also improve responsiveness to clients who are in-custody and often feel (and in fact, are) cut-off from the outside world and their legal service providers. Now, obviously, there are security issues here.... you can't just hand a defendant an iPad and say "knock yourself out"... they'll start surfing the web and use FaceTime to call people they're not supposed to, etc. They also sometimes do NOT like what their attorney is telling them, so there's the possibility that they could get pi**ed off and slam the iPad around or even try to destroy it. What we need is a case such that corrections staff could just press the "accept" or "answer" button and then lock it back up so that the client couldn't manipulate it... just talk to the caller that the corrections staff allows. So it has to be able to be locked up and secure and also protect the iPad from angry clients trying to damage it.
If anyone has brilliant ideas about how this could work, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks!