Carceral Media Practices: Dissolving Affiliation Through Infrastructural and Media Technologies in U.S. Prisons

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

Abstract

As dense systems of old technologies such as walls, locks, and turrets, prisons are designed to enclose, isolate, and confine. But like all enclosures, prisons are porous, and carceral control works as much by regulating certain mediations as it does by blocking and forbidding others. Recently, that control is exercised through the implementation of digital technologies, such as touchscreen tablets, and new protocols for already integrated (older) media technologies, like books and paper mail.
Presented as reform, the introduction of tablets and other computers into U.S. prisons appears to offer connectivity, education, and a modest cyber-utopia for incarcerated people. In reality, these machines provide little or no internet access and prohibitively expensive books while replacing in-person visits with pay-walled video calls. Similarly, services like Smart Communications’ MailGuard system—sending mail addressed to those imprisoned in Pennsylvania to a Florida worksite for scanning, labeling, digital storage, and destruction— are re-structuring and further securitizing practices of mediation by manipulating infrastructures of affiliation.
In my study of carceral media technology, I push beyond the obvious problem—profitability—and look at how affiliation and mediation are managed in/by prisons and incarceration. I argue that the management, surveillance, interruption, and refusal of affiliation and intimate practices of mediation are central to how incarceration has always worked in the U.S. The apparent and more subtle roles of media technologies in this apparatus of political, racial, and gendered oppression open questions about where and how carcerality is practiced, and what its primary social and political functions are.

Author

• Ian James Alexander, New York University