In a couple of months, David Lahnala will be able to kick back on his bunk at the Oregon State Correctional Institution and surf more than a dozen channels on his own flat-panel television.
After decades of watching television in large groups on cell block floors and in activity rooms, state prisoners increasingly are being offered another option: cable in cells.
Critics call the move criminal-coddling. Oregon Department of Corrections officials say prisons are crowded and losing recreation and education programs so that officers are constantly breaking up bloody fistfights during group TV hours.
At Oregon State Correctional Institution, where an inmate was stabbed in the neck with a pencil for talking during television time earlier this year, longtime Superintendent Jim Bartlett said he expects in-cell television to be "a good baby sitter."
As soon as that prison's canteen begins selling televisions in January, Lahnala and 319 other long-term inmates will get the freedom to flip from ESPN to the Discovery Channel in their cells.
Across the state, Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution is readying a "privileged housing" unit with cells wired for cable.
Others are considering similar moves. And some prisons already have done it. Oregon State Penitentiary, for example, has offered an in-cell cable package to inmates since 1987.Today, the maximum-security penitentiary in Salem is home to 1,900 of Oregon's most dangerous felons and their 1,124 personal televisions. They get 25 channels. On death row, if a new resident can't afford to buy a television, the state will lend him one.
Prisoners buy televisions - which have 7-inch screens, like those in coach class on airplanes - with money they make from working behind bars. The cable is funded by collective inmate trust accounts.
Corrections officials say that inmates forced to watch television shoulder-to-shoulder hardly act like a big, happy family in a living room.  At least twice a month arguments over noise, the program choice or a favorite seat turn violent. From time to time, TV fights send prisoners to a Salem emergency room for stitches.