Busted for Game Hints

Earlier this week we posted a story about a guy going to jail for selling mod chips online. Now we have a story about a guy going to jail for sending game hints through the mail!

It's a little more nuanced than that - Gary L. Messenger II, a state trooper at the time, got a little excited and beat up a guy with some trooper buddies. He was sentenced to time in prison. During his stay at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex, he made some friends. Evidently they were playing video games together there, but they were stuck! There was some part of the game they couldn't get past. So when he got out of prison, he looked up hints on the internet for the game they had been playing, and mailed them to his inmate friends back at Mount Olive. Unfortunately, this broke the terms of his parole - no correspondence with convicted felons. So he had to head back in for another 90 days incarceration at a halfway house. The story is here, in the Charlston Gazette: Ex-trooper sent to halfway house for giving game hints to inmates. I saw the story on TechDirt: Locked Up for Sending Game Cheats to Inmates. As TD points out, there's no mention of what games, or game systems these inmates have access to. I'm waiting for a call back from Judy in the warden's office at Mount Olive, she said she'd look in to it for me.

Comments

[jane]

aw, i'm sure if he explained to his parole officer just how *frustrating* it is to be stuck in a game - maybe he could justify it as preventing a full-scale riot!

i've often wondered what the most popular tv shows are in prisons. do they watch Oz? do they get HBO? i am vastly amused by the thought of actual ex-mafiosi watching The Sopranos. it hadn't occured to me that they'd play videogames too - though in retrospect that's obvious. although i wonder if there's some controversy - if certain wardens believe videogames might increase violent behavior?

[8bitjoystick.com]

a Japanese man was arrested for distributing videogame ROMs over the Internet.

http://www.gamespot.com/all/news/news_6024933.html

[Unimaginative Pseudonym]

Shouldn't prison be, you know, some kind of punishment ?

I mean, call me crazy if you like, but I always thought convicted criminals should be removed from society and generally made to feel bad about their crimes.

Watching TV and playing computer games doesn't really strike me as 'harsh'

Unless they make them play bad games...

[RickoniX]

Barbie's mall adventure?

[Akujin]

Well you can't just keep them in a corner for a few years, or you will drive them insane... I guess videogames is just a diversion, to lure them away from doing crazy shit.

[twifkak]

Yes, but it seems to me that what makes them do crazy shit is less the fact that they might not have the best meals or get to start internet businesses, but the fact that cellmate Bubba wants to get to know them better. None of this crap helps stem recidivism, which is always the goal.

[Ken]

When I was working customer support at Netflix, I received a call from an activities coordinator at a penitentiary who told me that Netflix was a godsend since the nearest video store was a pretty far drive into town. So, apparently inmates have access to movie rentals as well as video games. Now, I don't think that inmates should have nothing to do while incarcerated, but, looking at the rental record, I'd say making a bunch of hardened criminals watch "Dungeons and Dragons" is pretty cruel and unusual.