{"slug": "my-dad-is-in-prison-here-s-why-i-built-an-ai-chatbot-for-his-electronic-tablet", "title": "My Dad Is in Prison. Here's Why I Built an AI Chatbot for His Electronic Tablet", "summary": "Technology analyst CJ Jones built an AI chatbot named Nova for his incarcerated father, Charles Jones Sr., to use on a Securus prison tablet in Missouri, and the tool has grown into a for-profit company called Beyond Bars AI. Jones acknowledged that the large language models behind the chatbot can provide incorrect information, or hallucinations, and should not be relied on for legal or medical advice. The Marshall Project is telling Jones' story to illustrate how incarcerated people and their families pursue creative solutions to the challenges of life behind bars.", "body_md": "*Technology analyst CJ Jones was inspired to learn to code after years talking on the phone with his father, Charles Jones Sr., who is currently incarcerated in Missouri state prison. He built a tool that would allow his dad to send prompts to an AI chatbot — similar to ChatGPT or Claude — as a contact on his prison tablet. The family named the new contact Nova. Since his dad first tried Nova in 2024 and shared it with his friends, the tool has grown into a full-fledged, for-profit company called Beyond Bars AI.*\n\n*The large language models (LLMs) that form the basis for AI chatbots are an emerging and imperfect technology.. Jones acknowledged that the tool can provide incorrect information, often called hallucinations, and should not be confused for a conversation with a real person. While these tools can be a helpful resource, Jones stressed that they should not be relied on as a source of legal or medical advice and are not a substitute for a lawyer, doctor or other direct-services provider. The Marshall Project is choosing to tell Jones’ story because it illustrates how incarcerated people and their families are constantly in pursuit of creative solutions to the challenges of life behind bars and the frustrations of the criminal-legal system.*\n\nMy dad has been incarcerated my whole life, since I was 1 year old. My whole childhood, my life in general, was a practice of connecting between these two very different worlds: I was growing up out here, and he was in there. And so the way we stayed connected was through the phone and through technology, because that was the thing we were interested in.\n\nWe’d call and I would tell him what’s going on with me and what’s new with the world. And at some point, I realized that [he’d been inside since] what? 1999? He barely knows what Google is, right? So if I’m out here struggling to keep up with how fast everything is changing, you can imagine how difficult it is for him. And when I think about him getting out, I really just wanted him to have a window into the modern world so when he gets out he won’t be so green and fresh to it, but actually ready to rock and roll.\n\nI’m biased, obviously, but I think my dad is pretty smart. But even still, you can’t do much if you don’t understand the mediums of the world today. I noticed that all the stuff he wants to do in terms of being better, getting back on his feet after he gets out, it requires [tools of] the modern age — emails, websites — that he doesn’t understand.\n\nWe would have this rhythm where he would call me and I would look stuff up for him. A lot of times it was like the status of a [legislative] bill. So he would call me, I’d look it up, using Google and citing my sources and stuff, and I’d tell him the status of it. But then, over time, I would take exactly what he asked me and put it into ChatGPT — this is very early ChatGPT, like three years ago. And one time I was doing that and I realized, *I’m not adding value to the interaction anymore*. I was just a pipe to this other thing that provided the value. So I thought, *Well, why don’t I just give you this capability to search for yourself?*\n\nMy dad is in Missouri, which uses Securus tablets. And so through their e-messaging, I basically set up a bare-bones system where he could add [a chatbot I called] Nova as a contact on his tablet. It would automatically read, process and respond the way a human might, just more tirelessly. Now, there are two modalities: There’s Nova you can call on the phone, and then there’s Nova you can text through e-messaging.\n\nHe was definitely excited about the idea, because you know, they don’t get a ton of new [technology in prison], and my dad is the type of person who would have always had the latest iPhone. But I think he was still reluctant because he really had no idea how to use it. And so it took him a while to get used to because it’s not like anything else. It’s not like Google, because it talks like a person, but it’s not a person — it’s not conscious. So like my dad had to learn, like, *Do I have to say please and thank you?*\n\nIn the beginning, I would encourage him to ask very basic questions about assumptions that we don’t even talk about anymore on the outside. A common prompt structure would go, “Hey, I’ve heard about this thing. What’s up with that?” Very open-ended, or like for example: “What does it mean to ‘Google’ something? Why do people say that?”\n\nBut I was like the first Nova, and so that helped. Everything that Nova does, I first did for him. The easiest example is that if someone is asking about an old car that their dad used to have — let’s say it’s a Corvette — ChatGPT might display a picture. Nova has a tool that’s able to “see” that picture and then describe it to the user in a way that’s still entertaining and compelling, even though it can’t display the picture itself. When I was making it, I thought a lot about the way that might be most helpful for someone to hear something.\n\nLike when my dad [used to ask] me, “Hey, somebody told me about this car. Can you look it up for me?” I couldn’t show him over the phone what it looked like. So I would have to literally describe it, knowing that this is the only thing he has, and your mumbled description of the thing has to be enough for their imagination.\n\nOver time, I did notice a nice thing that happened with my dad. Before, sometimes he would call me and I would flinch a little bit. I’m always excited talking to my dad, but sometimes he would call me just to say, “Hey, can you look this thing up for me?” and then hang up after that, which is sort of more transactional than you want to be with the dad that you never lived with.\n\nOf course, when I was a kid, he would never use me for stuff like that because I think he was trying to raise me — impart knowledge to me, you know, or whatever dads do. But after, when I’m in college or in the workforce, it was like, *Oh, I can be a utility now, and I don’t know if I like this*. So I gave him the utility, and now we can go back to … maybe not imparting knowledge, but figuring out what type of relationship we’re gonna have.\n\nOr maybe it’s more like a return to how things were, just a more adult version. Regular people just know who their parents are, because they’re around them. But since I’m not, I have to hear about it. So it’s just a lot of stories and questions from all periods of his life. And it’s not, like, about a lesson or a moral, but the way I get to know him is through these stories that he’s telling me. It’s a little weird now since I’m the age that he was when he went away, so I’m gonna be doing things that he didn’t get a chance to do, but I still ask him [questions] like, “Hey, did this happen to you [when you were my age]?” So it’s those type of conversations, or we’ll even talk about things that happened recently in the news, because he can know about it now. Whether it be sports or business, he’s sort of up-to-date. He doesn’t have to ask what’s going on outside, he already knows and he has an opinion about what’s happening.\n\nHaving Nova, he doesn’t need me for those transactional web searches anymore. So now I know when I see his ID on my phone, he wants to talk to me.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-dad-is-in-prison-here-s-why-i-built-an-ai-chatbot-for-his-electronic-tablet", "canonical_source": "https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/08/14/prison-ai-chatbot-nova-cj-jones", "published_at": "2026-08-14 16:31:52+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-14 16:41:25.908407+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-products", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["CJ Jones", "Charles Jones Sr.", "Beyond Bars AI", "Nova", "Securus", "The Marshall Project", "ChatGPT", "Missouri"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-dad-is-in-prison-here-s-why-i-built-an-ai-chatbot-for-his-electronic-tablet", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-dad-is-in-prison-here-s-why-i-built-an-ai-chatbot-for-his-electronic-tablet.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-dad-is-in-prison-here-s-why-i-built-an-ai-chatbot-for-his-electronic-tablet.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/my-dad-is-in-prison-here-s-why-i-built-an-ai-chatbot-for-his-electronic-tablet.jsonld"}}