Carceral Securities: The Digital and Analog Making of Securitized Bodies in the New York City Jails

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - I

Abstract

While there has been growing awareness surrounding predictive policing and sentencing technologies, there has been little attention to the calculation, assessment, and enactment of risk in correctional facilities. This paper arises out of my ethnographic research approaching intake practices in the New York City (NYC) jails. The main arguments are that analog and digital intake practices and processes in the NYC jails reveal the carceral logics at their core, and in turn the data and algorithms they rely upon (health and correctional) make particular carceral bodies. The methods selected include ethnographic approaches to the research site with reliance upon ontological and critical phenomenological analytical approaches.

This research found that across intake incarcerated people undergo two parallel processes, one completed by the Department of Correction and the other by Health and Hospitals Corporation through which they are “processed” and “classified,” in order to be “housed.” Furthermore, the intake process relies upon specific analog and digital infrastructures and algorithms in service of the ultimate purpose of “security.”

This paper not only contributes to the body of STS literature addressing the criminal justice system, but also offers insight into the complexities of the epistemic practices of health care and corrections in jails. It demonstrates the frictions, coalescences, and relationalities of these two epistemic frameworks that form and categorize carceral bodies. Moreover, it demonstrates the unique potentialities of STS to open alternatives by highlighting systemic cruelties through the nuances and particularities of routinized violences.

Author

• Ariel Ludwig, Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech