Prison Media

How prisoners serve as media laborers, while the prison serves as a testing ground for new media technologies.

Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our understanding of both media systems and carceral systems? Prison Media foregrounds the ways in which the prison is a model space for the control and transmission of information, a place where media is produced, and a medium in its own right.

Examining the relationship between media and prison architecture, as surveillance and communication technologies are literally built into the facilities, this study also considers the ways in which prisoners themselves often do hard labor as media workers—labor that contributes in direct and indirect ways to the latest technologies developed and sold by multinational corporations like Amazon. There is a fine line between ankle monitors and Fitbits, and Prison Media helps us make sense of today’s carceral society.Preface ix
1 Introduction: Why Prison Media Matter 1
2 Penal Regimes and Prison Reforms: 1800-2000 21
3 Made in Prison: Prison Media Work 37
4 Building Prisons: Prison Media Architecture 71
5 Imagining the Prison: Prison Media Technologies 109
6 Conclusion: Prison Media and Mobile Incarceration 143
Notes 161
References 165
Index 183“Prison Media powerfully reveals how the modern penal system operates as a testbed for technology and workforce development that is deeply entangled with media and communication.” 
—Lisa Parks, Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara

“A brilliant, historically rich entry point to a completely new field, Prison Media shows how in prison, the ‘normal’ is prepared, defined, and managed for wider circulation, with media as its key relay.”
—Nick Couldry, Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science
 
“The prison joins such well-known sites of media innovation as the lab, the office, and the hospital. Prison Media critically convicts and elegantly retheorizes our carceral society and media as one. Quite literally, captivating.”
—John Durham Peters, María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies, Yale UniversityAnne Kaun is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her research on such topics as mediated temporalities and algorithmic culture has appeared in numerous journals, including Convergence, Information, Communication & Society, and New Media & Society.

Fredrik Stiernstedt is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. His research on media and the labor market and the relationship between social class and media has appeared in such journals as Convergence, European Journal of Communication, and Media, Culture & Society.