I'm wondering that if you do have any of the stuff that's not allowed will they take it on the initial visit or is that when they go over what you can and cannot have and allow you to ship it off to relatives in the meantime.
I have relatives willing to watch my smart phone and game system if it comes to that. Hopefully they don't go apeshit over our crazy business printer for some reason.

re: game systems.. My son has a few of these and the PO comes in and asks him if it's hooked up to the internet. My son tells him, of course, he has no internet.

I'm just wondering how long this will go on. They can't monitor everyone and not everyone can afford it. Since our world is so in the clouds , not letting SOs access to it seems unconstitutional at this point. I think monitoring is invading someone's privacy as well, not to mention the cost of the software and the people hired to monitor them.

Nak, how long is he on probation for and how long into it?

frog - he has 15 years probation for 1 count of cp. It's a bit extreme. January is his 2 year mark on probation and we're going to petition the court to get it cut back. He was sentenced in Floriduh. Philly is a bit more humane so I think we can get it cut back.

Holy poop! 15 years! That is extreme to have so many restrictions for that amount of time. I guess I'm lucky I'm only looking at 5 years. And hopefully that 5 can be cut down or at least any of the restrictions cut back before then.

Where I live the USPO allows a computer, if you pay the $29/month monitoring fee. But you can't keep anything in the cloud - only on your local hard drive. OR, you can use the computers at the local public library. But not both.

The cost of incarceration, and probation (including monitoring), etc., is paid for by the stinking taxpayers. Government contracts fund the Prison/Industrial complex. Its BIG business. We can expect them to market even more restrictions on offenders to the courts, and PO's, so they can suck more blood money out of the system.

Nak, what do they mean by "online" with a game system? Online with a browser or just online playing with friends?

He has xbox and playstation and you can hook them up to the internet, but my son doesn't have internet.

Online usually means online period. Most certainly not playing with others online. He can play on gaming systems that are hooked up directly to play with his known friends (ie LAN lines run around the house), but he can not connect to the internet (XBOX live, PS+) and play games that way.

Some POs will allow gaming systems. It depends on the offense, the PO and the county rules. In our county its up to the PO. He was allowed a gaming system. However he lied about it and had it taken away. I did get in contact with his PO last year about me getting him a Playstation for Christmas, that took a month for me to get her approval, and I had to prove to her I knew how to set up the controls so he wouldn't have access to the internet on it. XBOX are usually harder to get approved because the controls aren't as tight as Playstations parental controls. I

Some counties just do not allow offenders to have gaming systems. You'll have to check with the county.

Also the Xbox browser is a full blown browser whereas the Playstation one is limited and won't play videos and even has trouble with some sites.

The big thing with game systems isn't having a browser or anything like that it's that once online you're immediately able to contact children. All of your gaming friends may be adult and you see it as just playing a game with your friends but a PO sees an online console as a gateway to millions of minors that you can victimize. Unfortunately there is a fair amount of truth to that as online gaming has been identified as the number one way for internet predators to contact and groom their victims.