Digital media obfuscates the visibility of mass incarceration, the life in correctional facilities, and the components that constitute the carceral state under the influence of racial capitalism. In this section, I am going to talk about (the lack of) access to digital media, media work performed by prison labor, and popular media portrayals.
Incarcerated people often have very limited access to computer-mediated communication technology and digital infrastructures like computers and the internet, which limits their ability to communicate with their loved ones outside the correctional facilities, keep up with the constantly developing technological advances, or stay up to date with the most recent information and knowledge. (Jewkes & Johnson, 2009) Moreover, the Supreme court denied incarcerated people in jails the right to have journalist visits and conduct interviews for the purpose of news gathering. (Lomonte & Terkovich, 2021)
Despite the common belief and indication that incarcerated people are hardly in touch with digital media, the reality is more complicated. Even though they are not able to use and benefit directly from digital media directly, prison media work has been an important part of media work that produces, maintains, and repairs media devices and infrastructures. Prison media work includes material and immaterial work done by manual or non-manual labor, signifying a form of exploitation of the incarcerated people in the prison industrial complex. For example, in the US, the prison population's voice is sometimes recorded without the incarcerated individual's consent to generate data for commercial companies like Apple to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs or to achieve future crime detection and prevention.
Amid the emergence of the prison-military industrial complex, prisons became the experiment field for CCTV and all sorts of surveillance technology that the state plans to deploy across the country. Private companies monopolize the supply chain of all kinds of services in the correctional facilities, and they profit from employing prison labor which costs them little to none without any benefits needed to provide. Kaun and Stiernstedt point out that incarcerated individuals contribute to the development of surveillance technology. Their lives are recorded and digitized to every detail, and they serve as test subjects for new technologies that might otherwise face pushback from the public due to privacy concerns. (2020, p.1289)
The racial disparity of prison labor not only reflects the removal of African American people from the labor market but also depicts the exploitation and suppression of incarcerated black and brown people. Over the past few decades, the prison industrial complex has been expanding, and private companies have been profiting from prison labor, demonstrating the notion of racial capitalism, which "describes the process of extracting social and economic value from a… non-white (person of color) identity". ("Racial Capitalism," n.d.; Smith & Hattery, 2008) The current prison industrial complex resembles plantation economy and represents a modern form of slavery, whose visibility can be explained by "privatization by obfuscation" and "exclusion by inclusion" from Cottom's article (2020, p.442). Prison labor is both included and excluded – they engage in media work but cannot obtain sufficient access to digital media technology nor benefit from it. However, adequate access to technology could benefit incarcerated people.
The media work done by prison labor operates on the dangerous and unconstitutional premise that once people are incarcerated, they are no longer entitled to freedom, justice, and basic human rights. Not only the incarcerated people's freedom, labor rights, and right to privacy are undermined, but the process also becomes largely opaque to the public. The information about their data is obscured from public scrutiny, and the process of the exploitation and experimentation that contribute to the carceral state remain relatively invisible.
Currently, there is only a small percentage of the incarcerated population working for the private sector: “only about 5,000 people in prison — less than 1% — are employed by private companies through the federal PIECP program, which requires them to pay at least minimum wage before deductions.” However, it is worth noting that prison labor is what keeps the prison industrial complex going by “shift[ing] the costs of incarceration to incarcerated people” and diverting capitals to reinforcing other aspects of the system. (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020) Another important factor is that the issues with private prisons and prison labor reflect how much a system that should serve justice is eroded by racial capitalism, demonstrating the harsh reality that profits are sometimes more powerful than righteousness, which is something that we should be alarmed by.
Similarly, the media portrayals of mass incarceration aggravate the issue in terms of visibility. Digital media's selective aestheticization of crime, prison life, and the criminal punishment system exaggerates the problem of violence and crime, prejudice against marginalized communities, and calls for "tough on crime." (Schrag, 2020; Cheliotis, 2010) Digital media such as some newspaper outlets, TV shows, documentaries, and video games fosters racial capitalism in another way. It monetizes and profits from incarcerated people’s pain and suffering and minority communities’ fear and terror under constant state violence by presenting implicit criminalization of people of color and depicting fantasized experiences of incarceration.
Findings from Media Bias Report by Color of Change
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The prevailing media representations of prison also make us take prison for granted (Davis, 2011, p. 17), shaping our understanding of violent crimes. Despite the fact that violent crimes are pervasive in media coverage, a significant amount of people are not incarcerated for violent offenses. “Violent offenders made up (55%) of all sentenced state prisoners at year-end 2018 “, and “about 1 in 12 federal prisoners (8%) were serving time for a violent offense at the end of fiscal-year 2019” (Carson, 2020, p. 20). Despite the petrifying images of people who commit violent offenses in media to elicit fear and horror that make the public believe that they hare hardened criminals who would do it again if they were released, the recidivism for people who were once incarcerated for violent or sex offenses is quite low.
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People convicted of violent and sexual offenses are actually among the least likely to be rearrested, and those convicted of rape or sexual assault have rearrest rates 20% lower than all other offense categories combined. More broadly, people convicted of any violent offense are less likely to be rearrested in the years after release than those convicted of property, drug, or public order offenses."
-- Sawyer & Wagner (2020)
Everyone deserves a second chance, and we should include those who committed violent offenses when we are talking about reducing the prison population.
Several concepts from Castells' reading can explain the information age's effects on mass incarceration and incarcerated population (1997). Under the networking logic, capital flow from private companies bypasses the control of prison walls. (p.8) Incarcerated people and correctional facilities are both "switched off" in the sense that they are isolated from the society and switched on in the sense that prison labor becomes one of the sources of technological productions and capitalist profits. The information age also transforms the space and time inside prison walls, which reinforces the idea of "inclusion by exclusion." As time becomes "timeless" outside the correctional facilities, the lack of access to digital media technology renders the place under a time that runs slower than the outside world. While the space of incarceration is constantly portrayed by mass media, it is often inaccurate and racially biased, intending to stigmatize targeting groups, promote criminal stereotypes, and rationalize the carceral state. (Jewkes, 2014, p.54)