Cells and Servers: The Converging Logics of Prisons and Data Centers

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Movements as Responses to Crises

Abstract

The prison-industrial complex is one of the most visible and violent forms of infrastructure that shapes systems of extraction, surveillance, and racialized abandonment. Yet, it does not function in isolation. Its growing connections with digital infrastructures, especially data centers supporting artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and surveillance technologies, show how carceral ideas are being redefined through seemingly neutral regimes of energy, efficiency, and technological progress. While these infrastructures are often studied separately, communities on the ground are increasingly facing their overlap.

Focusing on the parallel expansion of the prison-industrial and data-center complexes (Hogan, 2021), this paper explores the shared spatial, political, and economic principles guiding their growth, including land use, energy extraction, regulatory secrecy, and exclusionary permitting processes. Drawing on insights from critical infrastructure studies, abolition geography, and science and technology studies, we analyze how these systems maintain systemic inequalities while limiting democratic participation and imposing additional burdens on Indigenous, Black, Latinx, migrant, and working-class communities.

Most importantly, this analysis is rooted in the experiences and knowledge of community organizers, abolitionists, environmental justice advocates, and technology justice movements who are already fighting against prisons, data centers, and energy infrastructure, often separately but against overlapping systems of power. By examining permitting and community engagement as sites of both dispossession and resistance, the paper shows how sociological analysis can support shared political education, coalition-building across movements, and community-led actions. In line with the 2026 ASA theme, this paper demonstrates how sociology can be used as a public and community-facing tool to help organizers and advocacy groups challenge the intertwined systems of carcerality and digital technology, and to expand collective ability to envision and create non-carceral, life-sustaining futures.

Authors

• Irene Franco Rubio, University of California, Berkeley

• Sanjana Paul, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Jasmine Hiroko McAdams, University of California, Berkeley