BERLIN Isolation, monotony, loneliness: It is a world unto itself when you are inside the Tegel Prison in northern Berlin.
But for the past one and a half years now, inmates in what is Germany's largest penitentiary have been at work on a virtual jailbreak. Under the address "www.planet-tegel.de" one can find the first Websites designed and maintained by prison inmates in Germany.
Now, a group of 15 of the facility's 1,700 prisoners are allowed to communicate via E-mail with the world beyond the jail's walls at certain times of the day.
"You are now entering the Planet-Tegel homepage. Please log on," is how the virtual visit inside Tegel starts out. What follows are pictures of sterile-looking corridors, barred windows, and doors with safety locks.
The accompanying texts describe the work, free time, and life in general inside the prison. Since first starting up in December 1998, the Tegel Website has had more than 50,000 hits.
"We wanted to break through the prisoners' silence and their isolation," says Berlin theater director Roland Brus, who together with the Cologne-based multimedia designer Michael Henning is the intellectual father of the project.
"Planet Tegel" was launched with the support of funds, but now the project is largely financed by donations, says project worker and computer expert Joerg Heger.
Twelve prisoners form the core of the computer group. One of them is Dittmar, who is serving an 11-year term, through the year 2003, for fraud and embezzlement.
Previously, the 34-year-old had never had any experience with computers, but now he can escape the monotony of prison life by tending to the art work of the Tegel Website.
"I don't want to get mentally rusty," Dittmar says.
The goal of the Tegel Website group is to counter the wrong impression which some outsiders might have about prisoners living as if in some hotel.
But before that could happen, the skeptical prison management had to be convinced about the project. Those prisoners who want to take part in the computer group must first get the authorities' permission.
The Internet pages are first created off-line with the help of Web designers and cannot be called up on-line by the Tegel prisoners.
E-mails initially were received by hand meaning that they arrived via an external computer, were printed out and then were brought to the inmates.
But now, at certain given times of the day, the computer group participants can send and receive E-mail messages on their own, in what Heger says is a unique arrangement anywhere in the world.
Brus says the direct E-mailing activity is a huge step forward: "Now we truly have the hole in the wall for which we have been fighting." By the end of the year, the Websites are also to be available in English. A new forum is being constructed to permit discussion of such topics as drugs and foreigners.
After that, the next step would be direct Internet access from inside the prison. But the prison direction is still opposed.
"I'm afraid that the inmates would be downloading extreme right-wing literature," says prison director Klaus Lange-Lehngut.
But he also says he has recognized some positive aspects to the Internet project and is now considering the possibility of offering information technology training for inmates. "We are now trying to get European Union funding for this," Lange-Lehngut said.
One inmate keen on such training is Dittmar. "If i don't get it here, then I will on the outside after my release," he says.
(DPA)