The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world. As of 2020, 2.3 million people were held in different kinds of correctional facilities.

However, currently, incarcerated people are only a fraction of those who are impacted by the criminal justice system. Over 4 million people are under parole or probation, and there are more than 200 million people who have been in contact with the criminal justice system personally or on behalf of their immediate family members.

Mass incarceration and the developing carceral state is a social injustice that has been affecting people of disadvantaged communities for decades in the United States. Poverty is oftentimes a predictor of incarceration, and people of color, especially the youth, are significantly overrepresented in the incarcerated population. Instead of addressing the problem properly, the government enacted War on Drugs, promoted counterterrorism rhetoric, justified the criminalization and punishment of the minority population in the name of “law and order”. The criminal justice system is broken, and governmental institutions are building more prisons and filling more people in it for profit.

In this manifesto, I am going to argue that technology and media exacerbate the problem in various forms. Surveillance technology in and outside the correctional facilities focuses on the control and punishment of people of color disproportionately rather than rehabilitation and reparation. Incarcerated people are excluded from the use of media and communication technology but exploited by racial capitalism to conduct media work. Problematic media portrayals also play a role in the expansion of mass incarceration and the carceral state, leading to the ambivalent visibility of the incarcerated bodies, mass incarceration, and the criminal justice system. To resolve the problem, I propose that incarcerated people should have access to digital technology. Discriminatory and punitive technologies should be either fixed or abolished. Moreover, digital media can serve as a platform for people to organize against mass incarceration, towards prison abolition and learn anti-surveillance resistance strategies to protect their identities.