Kaun and Stiernstedt 2023
Kaun and Stierstedt, Prison Media (2023)
1. Introduction: Why Prison Media Matter
… and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology, our foundational bolt, is prison media, a term that captures both media that are produced in and for the prison and the prison as a medium. Media are here understood in terms of their material properties, as
1
infrastructures and artifacts as well as practices rather than content or forms of representation (Williams, 1974; Couldry, 2012).
2
We explore the double nature of prison media: the entanglement of media infrastructures inside and outside the prison through prison work, how prison architecture serves as a medium in itself, and in what ways prisons constitute test beds for technology development. Our main starting point for engaging with prison media is that the modern penal system is deeply intertwined with both media and com- municati…
2
On the contrary, prisons and media have been closely related since the emergence of the modern prison in the nineteenth century.
3
Initially banning media to gradually allowing specific kinds of media as part of the corrective approach, the penal system has always considered media to both foster certain corrective approaches and undermine prison rules, as in the case of contraband.
3
Prison architecture has furthermore historically and up to today been an answer to the question of communication: the buildings themselves allow and constrain specific forms of communication and hence function as an example of how the built environment constitutes an important trajectory of mediation.
3
P ons have hence in many ways been test beds for technological development, with repercussions for the broader society. At this moment when technology is imagined as transforming prisons, it makes good sense to return to the longer history of the relation between prisons and media to gain a better understanding of their contemporary and future configurations.
3
One site where disciplinary power of the prison emerges but that has so far been largely overlooked are media infrastructures.
5
Infrastructures— including media infrastructures—are an assemblage of different practices in relation to material settings that are constantly evolving and continuously reshaped (Appel et al., 2018).
6
…prisons are media in and of themselves. Their architecture connects and moves people around while relying on media technologies to organize these processes (e.g., CCTV surveillance systems, monitor con- trol rooms, and access to television sets for incarcerated individuals). At the same time, prisons are also a site of infrastructural work: they are the places where media infrastructures are bui…
7
The understanding of infrastructure that we apply in these pages is fundamentally relational. It emerges in the practices and activities of people connected to prisons and their technical structures.
7
Infrastructures are fundamentally about social arrangements and must be learned rather than being adopted naturally. Following this understanding, prisons are infrastructures on dif- ferent levels. On a macrosocial level, they are infrastructures that are sup- posed to maintain social order by controlling deviant populations. On a meso level, they arrange bodies in time and space with the help of a specific architecture of corridors, tunnels, and gates. On a micro level, they must be learned to be embodied by both guards and incarcerated individuals and structure their experience of time and …
7
Prison media, however, beg not only a media infrastructural perspective that is focused on practices and relations. In order to develop our understand- ing of prison media, we also turn our attention to the sociotechnical imagi- naries that in many ways undergird, prepare, and legitimize the material formation of media i…
8
Similarly, we consider the discursive c tion of prison media as performative and forms of meaning making that have consequences for how prisons are organized but also for how technology is developed for sectors other than corrections.
8
At the same time, media work conducted in prisons has contributed in decisive ways to the emergence and maintenance of several media infrastructures, including the telegraph sys- tem, the postal system, television, and radio.
10
…prison architecture itself could be under- stood as a medium that includes walls, fences, and sounds, smells, and tastes that structure time, space, and communication for the incarcerated individu- als as well as guards and visitors as other media such as the television and the compu…
11
From the outset of modern prisons in the nineteenth c tury, the question of how to regulate incarcerated individuals’ media access and communications has been a central issue. The management of commu- nication between incarcerated individuals, between guards and incarcerated individuals, and between incarcerated individuals and visitors from outside is crucial for the establishment and maintenance of con…
13
During the history of the modern prison (from the mid-nineteenth century onward), shifting penal ideologies have sought to manage communication and media use in different ways. The early prison regimes tried to minimize the incarcerated individuals’ com- munication with others to create “self-communication,” or introspection, for the incarcerated to ponder their crimes and develop into reformed indi- viduals. Media use was restricted to an absolute minimum and normally only consisted of the Bible and a few other books that were seen as morally constructive. As rehabilitation and normalization grew stronger and penal ideology (as well as practice) changed in the twentieth century, communi- cation was less restricted: on the contrary, the road to reform went through making the incarcerated communicate (with each other, with staff, and with the surrounding world). Media use went from being forbidden to becom- ing encouraged as part of the treatment and care of the incarcerated (access to books, newspapers, radio, music systems, and later television became a right in prison). “Communication” became a positively charged buzzword within the developing penal regime from the mi…
13
Prison media is a heuristic that aims to make visible how the development of the prison is entangled with the development of our media; it is a way of seeing, and this way of seeing is facilitated in different sights where we trace the overlaps of the prison and media infrastructure.
15
Boundary objects are enacted and made sense of in different ways across social worlds, but they are fuzzy enough to be recognized in different contexts. They need to be unspecific to a certain degree to flatten potential tensions between the social worlds and their different ways of sense making. Through their mutual recogni- tion in different social worlds, boundary objects allow for collaboration across boundaries and thereby make them less absolute. Prison media— media produced for and in the prison as well as the prison as medium—can work as such boundary objects. They travel between the prison worlds and other social worlds and blur t…
17
2. Penal Regimes and Prison Reforms: 1800–2000 - The Birth of the Modern Prison
The control of movements, sounds, and communication was an impor- tant feature of the modern prison and made strong impressions on seasoned officers of the correctional services as well as on visitors, as two encounters illustrate.
23
Pen
23
The penal system’s new focus on work and especially industrial work served these emerging state and commercial bureaucracies with cheap labor, delivering the goods needed to create and maintain the bureaucratic corporations and the welfare state of postwar Sweden. Furniture and equip- ment for schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, public authorities, and the state apparatus as well as for new communication technologies such as the tele- phone system, broadcasting, and traditional communication infrastructures such as the postal system were, as we will see, delivered by pris…
27
If the prognosis in the 1970s had been that prisons were soon to be con- signed to the dustbin of history, the reality of prison development has com- pletely upended that assumption.
29
Global trends toward automation and the increasing outsourcing of labor have made the demand for cheap prison labor drop. It has been increasingly difficult to find customers for the indus- trial production conducted in prisons (Kindgren & Littman, 2015).
33
…(i.e., move- ment in space, interactions, and modes of communication) and for these pur- poses makes use of different media technologies, the different penal regimes outlined above also—to some extent—entail different ideas and ideologies of communication.
33
While the modern prisons of the nineteenth century had a regime of strictly prohibited interaction with other fellow humans, they privileged communication as a form of “broadcasting”: incarcerated individ- uals could receive messages broadcast from one central point, usually a lectern installed between the balconies where the cells were located, from which the priest or the warden could address all incarcerated individuals a…
33
The early prisons were by no means places of noncommunication even though they were media envi- ronments characterized by scarcity. On the contrary, the early modern penal regime put strong emphasis on the transformative power of (mediated) com- munication: when the right messages were received at the right time, they would help reform incarcerated individuals and transform them into a socially benign exi…
33
If the media and communicative environment of the modern prison had been one of scarcity and “broadcasting,” the 1950s and 1960s was an era in which prisons were organized according to the “small group principle” in which interaction between incarcerated individuals and their communica- tion with each other was understood as a key element in thei…
34
Furthermore, a range of different communications media and cultural forms now entered the prisons: radio, film, newspapers, theater, music (both recorded and live), and later television.
34
…media use—reading books, newspapers, and magazines as well as listening to the radio and going to the movies—came to be seen as essential for the incarcerated person’s reintegra- tion into society. Media use was seen as enabling incarcerated persons to keep in contact with “normal” society outside of prison walls and maintain citizen- ship and “pub…
34
Prison administrations have increasingly discussed how media technolo- gies can be used to achieve and maintain control of incarcerated individ- uals, a crucial question in all punitive practice.
34
In the period of the industrial prison, it also became increasingly common and encouraged by prison administration for incarcerated individuals to engage in media production themselves. A range of newspapers written, produced, and printed by incarcerated persons were launched in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
34
Later, prison papers were followed by radio broadcasts produced by incarcerated individuals.
35
If the modern prison was a place of solitude where the incarcerated person was expected to listen to messages disseminated from prison priests and war- dens and communicate with oneself through introspection and God through prayer, the industrial prison and postwar penology represented a regime of dialogue, interaction, communication, and communi…
35
…media use by incarcerated individuals was also a hotly debated topic. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, media use among incarcerated persons had been encouraged and even mandated by law. In the 1980s, new media technologies entered the prison but not without public debate…
35
At the turn of the m nium, the issue of internet access became a focal point for debate: should incarcerated individuals be allowed to have access the internet, and if so how should their access be regulated?
36
In earlier years, the large public report C rectional Services within Institutions (SOU, 1971) had presented television and radio as essential tools for the rehabilitation and reintegration into society of incarcerated individuals, arguing that they all should therefore have access to television and radio within the facilities. In 2005 A Penal System for the Future, the first large governmental report on the penal system published since 1972, was completed. The fundamental assumptions grounding this new report had changed considerably since the 1970s. Media access was no longer presented as a right: instead, it is framed as a “privilege” for well- behaved incarcerated individuals, one part of a larger “privilege system” sug- gested for use in the prison servi…
36
The penal history, then, can also be interpreted as a form of media and communications history in which com- municative ideals, media technologies, and media infrastructure, together with other social and cultural changes, produce different penal regimes that crystallize and materialize in different kinds of policies in prison practices as well as in architecture and buildin…
36
3. Made in Prison: Prison Media Work
From the telegraph and the canal network to machine learning and artificial intel- ligence (AI), prisons and incarcerated individuals have been a crucial—but largely invisible—labor force underpinning media infrastructures and net- works of communication.
37
Prison media work has hence been mostly but not solely about constructing, repairing, and maintaining communi- cation infrastructure or components for such infrastructure, such as the
38
production of cables, poles, and microelectronics. Few have considered the relationship between prison work and media work because the work conducted by incarcerated individuals most often includes manual and industrial tasks in general not associated with the alleged expressivity and creativity of cultural production.
39
Historically, the development of industrial prison work can be divided into roughly two periods. The first period stretches from World War II until the early 1980s, and the second period extends from the 1980s to the present. Together, these two periods point to a shift from manual produc- tion to the passive work of being tr…
39
The work of being tracked, as with other forms of work in relation to digital platforms (as the example with the start-up company Vainu illustrates), is a form of “back-end” work, a practice that constitutes a necessary physical infrastruc- ture for digital culture’s front end that we as mundane users experience (Parks et al., forthcoming). Expanding the concept of media work to such back ends allows us to see how the captive labor of incarcerated individuals has contributed to media and communication infrastructures throughout the history of the modern prison. This can be seen as both a fulfillment and an extension of the logics of surveillance inherent and invented in the mod- ern cell prison as such in the ninet…
41
… one of Sweden’s largest prisons and a long-standing platform for critical discussions of penal policy both within and outside the prison—mentions the coming of a “million-dollar industry” that is going to be developed at the facility as soon as the new mo…
42
The Kumla prison was one of two facilities that was planned during the 1950s and opened in the 1960s and was supposed to replace an older prison, Långholmen in Stockholm. In this older prison, the main work operation had been printing:
47
In the beginning, we printed the yearbook of the forensic psychiatric clinic and the employee directories. Later we printed the forms of the prison services, customs and the forest services. We also printed the prison papers Murbräckan and Cellstoff, which were set manually.
48
There is a broad range of such sites and practices that constitute a necessary but largely invisible infrastructure for media and cultural production. A range of routine tasks that rest on cheap (or free) labor must be performed and aggregated to make possible the front end, that is, the experiences of media user’s and consumers of cultural products.
49
In that sense, the manual, routine, and piecework production of prison industries can be seen as forms of media work, and this media work has shifted in relation to more general social processes and transformations within media industries.
49
This mirrors the general focus of the modern industrial prison on devel- oping facilities for large-scale and industrial work that had not been pos- sible in the older cell prison facilities built in the nineteenth century.
49
The workshops at Kumla Prison, with their focus on mechanical industry and woodwork, hence shifted the nature of manual prison media work from printing to infrastructural (hardware) work.
50
Expanding educational and bureaucratic organizations after World War II needed infrastructure to function, and incarcerated individuals provided the cheap labor required to manufacture the large quantities of bookshelves, filing cabinets, desks, chairs, folders, binders, and records needed. For example, Swedish incarcerated individuals met the entire Swedish government administration’s need for bookshelves, delivering approximately 5,000 shelves every year.
50
…work for the public telecommunication and postal s vices stood for between 6 and 12 percent of the total production within the Swedish prison system in the first half of the 1970s. However, large private companies such as the Swedish Film Industry and Ericsson were also among the clients ordering components for media and communication infrastructure from the prison industry. The total share of prison work that was media-related was therefore higher.
51
For the postal service, Swedish incarcerated individuals produced infor- mation boards, letter bags for postmen, letter trays, parts of postbags, air mail bags, parts for typewriters, wallets, package trays on wheels, folders, and stamps as well as pallets. Televerket ordered bookshelves, letter bags, mail- box stands, trays for catalog holders, spacer plates, spacer tubes for catalog holders, flags, parts of headphones and other small electronic parts on a large-scale every year in t…
52
The overall role of prison labor for the media and communication indus- tries is as hard to fully assess. However, prison labor has significance for spe- cific products that require low-skilled routine work at low costs.
53
During the 1970s, the nature of work within prisons changed. These changes were to a large part driven by general changes in the labor market and in society.
54
Many of the customers who had previously relied on prisons for manufacturing work also turned to this new labor market.
54
Ironically, the efforts to improve prison working conditions reduced the demand for incarcerated individuals’ work and limited opportunities for the institutions to offer meaningful workshop employment to incarcerated individuals (table 3.3).
56
As of 2018 there were at least 37 different media companies in the customer regis- ter of the Swedish prison production (table 3.4). It is still common for prison interiors and prison clothes used as costumes for TV and film productions to be made by incarcerated individuals in prison workshops. The product catalog from KrimProd, which lists their own products (not those sub- contracted and produced on demand) include media and communication artifacts such as TV boxes, newspaper stands, acoustic panels, street stands, computer shells, envelopes, and correspondenc…
57
Media work in prisons has hence gone from gravitating toward hardware for communication infrastructure and larger (public) technical systems for distribution to becoming more aimed at infrastructures for advertising media and media display.
59
In the cell prisons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, incarcerated individuals were not even visible to each other; they were separated by screens or covered by masks when they were in the communal areas of the prisons (which happened rarely) and were otherwise isolated from each other in separate cells.
59
Moreover, the seclusion and invisibility of the people within the prison opened new forms of visibility: on the one hand the surveillance in the prison where the incarcerated individual was always subject to a surveying gaze and on the
59
other hand the media spectacle or media fantasies of the secret world of the prison as imagined in popular culture.
60
A similar development in media work is the fact that when incarcerated individuals were more visible to the public eye (e.g., working outside of the prison walls), they produced mainly “invisible” media infrastructures such as digging for underground cables. The media work by the invisible incarcerated person of the contemporary prison is, on the contrary, highly visible in society and is often technologies for producing visibility in so-called display media.
60
The newsstand also underlines another long-standing tradition within prison media work: the relation between newspapers and incarcerated labor. The history of newspapers and print journalism has mainly focused on jour- nalists, newspapers as organizations, journalistic content, and the role of print journalism in society (see, e.g., Wahl-Jorgensen & Hanitzsch, 2009). Less acknowledged in these histories is the processes and work that make newspapers as such possible from the outset, such as printing and distribu- tion. In both areas, incarcerated individuals and incarcerated labor have a role throughout me…
60
…mass circulation of newspapers possible. Even though automation was increased, by the end of the century printing was still a craft that needed con- siderable amounts of manpower (Musson, 1974). Newspapers generally had their own printing operations and needed (cheap) labor to operate them. For this purpose, people otherwise excluded from the labor market were used to staff the print shops, such as persons cognitive impairment. Incarcerated indi- viduals were also a category of workers often hired to operate the printing of the new mass press of the late nineteenth century (Kellokumpu, 1997, p. 149). This was at a time when incarcerated individuals could work outside of prison facilities, return after a working day, and hence could be hired by newspapers. Later printing operations moved into the prisons themselves, but in these print shops newspapers were rarely printed, and incarcerated labor had no role in printing newspapers during the twentieth c…
60
In the industrial prisons developing in the mid-twentieth century, newspaper distribution and circulation instead became part of the work of
60
incarcerated individuals.
62
Newspaper distribution is, however, an area in which the news organization wants to keep costs to a minimum, and this explains why much production of working equipment for newspaper car- riers has been conducted in Swedish prisons.
62
Bags for carrying newspapers were commissioned from several Swed- ish penal institutions and produced in large quantities. At Kumla Prison, a trolley (figure 3.3) was at first commissioned and later became one of the facilities’ licensed products, as they …
62
The carriers of newspapers upholding the distribution infrastructure had a major role in deciding the size and weight of newspapers. This invisible back end of the newspaper industry hence was important for how much news and informational material each
63
issue of a given newspaper could contain. To allow for heavier newspapers with more pages and more material (and more advertising), the newspaper industry turned to the Swedish prison industry, which developed trolleys and other equipment for carriers and produced this equipment cost-efficiently enough for it to be profitable. Hence, a series of processes in the back ends of media production and distribution had a decisive impact on and role in forming and guiding the editorial decisions on what to include in a newsp…
64
Moving from manual work in the 1940s to a steep decline of prison media work during the 1970s and 1980s and a reemergence of that work in the 1980s, current prison media work is characterized largely by the principles of digitalization. Here the notion of the smart prison—a prison reliant on digital devices for the sake of increased reliability and efficiency—is key for understanding the latest articulation of prison media work, namely the work of being tracked (and consequently dat…
64
…based on emotion recognition and are predictive with the help of automated analyses of voice recordings, the neural networks that allow for this kind of predictive work need to be trained. The databases emerging in US prisons are the perfect training sets.
67
The productive labor of incarcerated individuals constructing the data- bases through being tracked and datafied can be understood as one form of “behavioral surplus” (Zuboff, 2019).
68
The “work of being watched” (Andrejevic, 2002) that
68
incarcerated individuals perform is a key dimension of prison media work; however, it is also increasingly driving broader societal transformations of how labor is structured, including the media work performed by prison guards.
69 4. Building Prisons: Prison Media Architecture
The architecture of prisons carries and mediates ideas of punishment and rehabilitation. The structure of communal spaces, the individual cells, the workshops, and the outlook of the prison building itself are expressions of the imaginaries of what prisons, punishment, and rehabilitation are about.
71
The two central periods of prison construction—the emergence of cell prisons (1846–1898) and industrial prisons (1956–1967)—are also peri- ods in which technologies for surveillance and control were developed and incorporated in the physical prison architecture in different w…
72
Furthermore, the prison architecture produces a specific communica- tive rhythm of prison life depending on how the incarcerated are moving between different parts for communal and recreational activities, work, and eating as well as isolation.
72
4. Building Prisons: Prison Media Architecture - Cell Prison Architecture
…prison buildings are a form of media for communication. They are to a high degree solutions to problems of communication as symbolic expression and representation but also as actual movement/transportation: prisons as phys- ical constructions are responding to questions of how to prohibit, control, manage, and (sometimes) enhance the communication of the incarcerated with staff, with each other, and with the outside w…
73
During the nineteenth century hundreds of new prisons were constructed throughout the Western world. This was mainly an elite project, lobbied and pushed for by liberal leaders (politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc.) and liberal reformists, and not the result of popular demands for changes in penal pol- i…
74
The first modern cell prison is usually considered to be the San Michele prison in Italy, constructed by Carlo Fontana and commissioned by Pope Clemens XI (1704), and the Gent prison drawn by the architect Malfaison (1775). The principles used to construct these facilities were described by the prison reformer John Howard (1777) in his book The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons.
75
The Philadelphia system, envisioned and developed by the Quaker movement in the US, eventually became the main reference point for the first modern facilities in Sweden and around the world.
77
…one of the key issues for prison architecture was the problem of com- munication. The prison environment was supposed to prohibit certain forms of communication and interaction in order not to become a “school of vise” (p. 225) and to enhance possibilities for surveillance and security. As Ben- tham had previously argued on the panopticon, the incarcerated individual should be “secluded from all communication with each other” (Bentham, 1791/1995, p. 34). John Haviland in this respect referred to the “evil of conversing”: the problem of unconstrained communication between the incarcerated individuals (quoted in Meranze, 1996, p. 249). On the other hand, the prison architecture should enhance other “proper” forms of commu- nication and…
79
As the incarcerated individuals became increasingly invisible, the institution itself, the prison, was more visible than ever before. The new facilities were erected in the city centers and were large buildings, often interpreted in contemporary commentary as “castles,”…
80
From now on the incarcerated persons themselves, previously visible in the city as part of their publicly performed corporeal punishment, were no longer the main messenger of the consequences of crime: the institution as such, with its high visibility, became the symbol of the relation between society and its deviants.
80
The new facilities not only produced a specific and ambiguous invisibil- ity of the incarcerated individuals in society; the general idea was also that they should be invisible from each other within the prison.
80
Any contact between incarcerated individuals could lead to spreading the social virus of criminality and therefore architectural efforts as well as efforts of interior design, and different technical solutions were taken to make the incarcerated individuals invisible to each other.
81
A more direct effect of the prison architecture with consequences for the possibility to see was the lighting in the prisons.
81
Vision and sound were regulated and managed through the architectural features of the cell prison. Silence was mandated for the incarcerated individuals as well as for the guards. The very first paragraph of the handbook for Swedish prison directors from the time states that “within a cell prison, silence and stillness must be observed” (Mentzer, 1878, p. 19).
82
In the architectural design of the prison, the issue of silence was a problem that needed solutions. The walls between the cells, for example, needed to be thick enough to be sound- proof; on the other hand, some sound needed to be able to penetrate the construction, since an important part of the surveillance of the incarcerated individuals was to hear them in case they broke the order of silence and con- sequently puni…
82
As preserved artifacts (often seized by the guards) and archival sources reveal, incarcerated individuals showed a great deal of creativity and were willing to take considerable risks in order to facilitate (the strictly forbidden) communication between them. Notes, letters, poems, and drawings made with contraband were passed around in inventive ways, and even though all contact between the incarcerated was prohibited the records show that such contacts were common.
83
Since almost all modern prisons in the nineteenth century had systems of central heating, the pipes became effective carriers of sound between the cells. At least three different variants of the “knocking alphabet” (Blomqvist & Waldetoft, 1997, p. 115) have been described and preserved…
84
The requirements in the new policy from 1945, forming one of the cornerstones in the Swedish idea of normalization that included daily rou- tines that resembled life outside the prison as much as possible: eight hours of work (or studies), eight hours of leisure, and eight hours of re…
87
Another important dimension in the new penal ideology was the “principle of the small group” (Fångvårdens byggnadskommitté, 1965).
87
Since the new penal policy from 1945 had explicitly mandated that incarcerated individuals should have possibilities for sport and exercise, sporting fields were a part of the new facilities as well as “ping-pong tables at every ward” (Fångvårdens byggnads…
88
Prisons, along with other large-scale institutions of the nineteenth century such as reformatories, hospitals, factories, workhouses, and asylums, accord- ing to the historian Roger Luckhurst, distributed space in ways that were fundamentally “corridoric” (Luckhurst, 2019, p. 159), namely built around central corridors that connect the different rooms of the bui…
89
The term “corridor” is derived from French and Italian corridore and corridoio, respec- tively, for “running place,” a passage you are supposed to move through quickly. The term is also related to correspondence and hence has a clear communicational ground…
90
The corridor was hence connected with the notion of speed and quick and efficient com- munication, but it was also connected with the image of being dark and lonely, even haunted, which led to a resistance against corridors in public architecture of early nineteenth-century Engla…
90
In the older regime of the cell prison, the staff was explicitly forbidden to engage in conversations with incarcerated individuals (Mentzer, 1878, p. 26). In the industrial prison, conversations with staff were considered an
96
essential part of the rehabilitation process.
97
The new focus on communication in the postwar industrial prison was also mirrored in how technological solutions were incorporated in the building in order to enhance communication between staff and incarcerated individuals. One such feature was the central radio, installed in each cell. The radio was turned off at nighttime but worked around the clock as a transmitter-receiver, so that the incarcerated individuals could communicate with the staff in the guard room, and vice versa. The cells also had wall- mounted book shelfs. Books and magazines were among the media products that now entered the prisons.
97
This followed the new penal legislation from the 1940s that made access to culture and media a fundamental right for incarcerated individuals and hence marked a strong shift from the era of the cell prison where media and communications were almost entirely prohibited. Hence, the new penal regime also needed a new architecture to accommodate media
97
within the prison. The movie theaters at the larger prison facilities are a clear-cut example of this shift. Other examples of how the new media envi- ronment is made possible through architecture and interior design are the wall-mounted radio systems in the cells, telephone booths, space for com- munal television, and lib…
98
This resonates with the report from the Swedish Prison and Probation Service in which communication is one of the most prominent buzzwords and almost all “positive” features of architecture and interior design are acknowledged to enhance communica- tion.
100
One of the contemporary fantasies of a technologically enhanced prison is the so-called prison without guards. The most internationally renowned experiment of this kind is taking place in Singapore, where a range of advanced technological solutions are being deployed in order to replace the human employee within the prison with artificial intelligence and smart monitoring systems. Technologies such as video analytics systems, data ana- lytics, biometric sensing, and facial recognition are hoped to replace human surveillance, while the use of smart technologies, such as tablets, apps, and digital kiosks are supposed to replace or at least simplify the treatment, care, and resocialization of incarcerated individuals (Khair, 201…
100
The logic of CCTV and other technical surveillance systems has been traced to the early use of photography within criminal institutions and police departments that began in the nineteenth century.
101
For Norris and Armstrong (1998), CCTV in the twentieth century was a continuation of this tradition while also rely- ing on the “panoptic” ideal of the prison developed in the same period. By connecting these two technologies—the panopticon as an architecture of inspection and surveillance tool and photography as a technology of visual representation—the idea of a tele-technical surveillance system was born, they ar…
101
…t Union and Nazi Ger- many already in the 1930s, but it was after World War II that the technology was developed more broadly and was implemented in both the prison and policing context in Western Europe and later in the US (Lauritsen & Feuer- bach, 2015).
101
Changes in the penal policy of 1945 that created a need for a new form of prison architecture (with factories, leisure areas, and greater freedom of move- ment for incarcerated) in turn needed new technologies for surveillance and control.
102
…between the incarcerated and staff, is the new ideal, and a number of new professions—experts in communication such as psycholo- gists, therapists, curators, and pedagogues—enter the prisons. There was a need to automate parts of the work in prisons, freeing officers from guard duties to perform “higher-order jobs,” as expressed in the contemporary di…
102
5. Imagining the Prison: Prison Media Technologies
The idea of prisons as test beds for novel technologies was already pointed out by Michel Foucault when he argued that “the Panopti- con was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experi- ments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on incarcerated individuals, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones” (Foucault, 1…
109
The prison is imagined in Foucault’s terms as not only a site for distinguishing between the good and the evil, a site of discipline, but also a place of experimentation for
109
disciplining technologies outside the prison walls.