The Incarcerated Workers Movement: Incarcerated and Free Activism in The New Information Age

• In Event: Social Movements and the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

In many ways, the Incarcerated Workers Movement resembles past prison and jail movements. Like the Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery, the Prisoners’ Rights Movement, the State Prison of Southern Michigan Workers, the North Carolina Prisoners Union, and the Oak Park Heights Strikers, the Incarcerated Workers Movement opposes “prison slavery,” advocates from increased compensation for incarcerated workers, and includes both free and incarcerated activists. Yet, unlike these past movements, the Incarcerated Workers Movement is situated within a new era of “information and communications technologies" (ICTs). The Incarcerated Workers Movement exists in a world which knows cell phones, email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and online crowd-sourcing. Since the turn of the century, social movement scholars have documented the profound ways in ICTs have transformed how movements recruit, organize, and experience surveillance. Yet, little is presently known about the effects of these technologies on social movements operating within American institutions of incarceration. Using data collected from the Incarcerated Workers Movements' digital presence, I explore the role of ICTs in the recruitment, organization, and repression of free and incarcerated activists. I then consider the implications of ICT advancement on social movements organizing within institutions of incarceration and areas of limited ICT accessibility.

Author

• Jacqueline Henke, Purdue University