A sense of the ordinary from behind bars

An inmate works on her reading material in Beijing Women's Prison on March 5. PHOTOS BY CUI MENG / CHINA DAILY

Staying connected

Beijing Women's Prison, located in southern Daxing district, opened in 1999 and houses about 1,000 inmates.

According to a previous statement by city authorities, most of the women who end up here have committed violent or economic crimes, or were involved in drug trafficking.

The facility was chosen to pilot the high-tech intranet in September, and Gan Yonghong, head of inmate management, said it has quickly become an integral part of the prison's reward and punishment system.

"The spending cap on purchases depends on an inmate's performance," she explained. "If an inmate does well and gets her sentence reduced, her account will be credited.

"We don't pay as much (for work) as the outside world. After all, it's a prison. It's just a token payment," Gan said.

The intranet is not just for shopping. Women can browse in-house media to keep up with current affairs, and comments can be shared on an internal micro blog, not too different from Twitter or Sina Weibo.

Seven inmates run the "media center", which includes a website, a newspaper and a television channel, from an office on the second floor of the main building.

"What I do is collect information from newspapers or magazines provided by the correction officers and then write stories for our (intranet) news site," Shen Xiaoxia, one of the seven, said, sitting at her keyboard.

The 38-year-old former civil servant is a month away from completing her first year of a six-year stretch for taking bribes. She said she enjoys her prison job, as her postgraduate major at college was computer science.

"We focus on hot social issues, such as the country's two sessions," she said. "I'm paid about 100 yuan a month."