Abstract
Abstract This article explores the ways in which prisons are imagined as sites of technology development. By attending to expos that showcase prison technologies and constitute “live theatres of technology” (L. Cornfeld, 2018), we carve out ambivalent sociotechnical imaginaries of technological backwardness that are combined with the idea of radical technological innovation to reform the justice system. In doing so, we highlight the prison as one site of technology development and actors at technology trade shows catering to the prison and security sector as platforms for technological mediators that range from corporate prison tech companies to educators as well as representatives of the criminal justice system. The expos emerge as sites where technological development is negotiated through performative sociotechnical imaginaries of prison tech.
Highlights
Prison tech: Imagining the prison as lagging behind and as a test bed for technology advancement
After mapping different social groups involved in forming the prison tech industry, we turn to the sociotechnical imaginaries that are produced at the expos and that are an important part of technological advancement
Imaging Radical Innovation in the Prison As we have shown above there are specific sociotechnical imaginaries that are activated in the prison context
Summary
Prisons are rarely connected to technological development. It is a rather a picture of absence of technologies that comes to mind when thinking of places of incarceration, especially digital media technologies seem evacuated from the prison space. While exploring the general dispersion of captivating technology in society, the authors focus on discriminatory design and argue that there is a paradox of techno-fixes that are supposedly developed and implemented to overcome preprint author version human bias, while being based on biased and discriminatory logics with different implications for poor and racialized people than majority groups Extending these earlier explorations of carceral and surveillance technologies, we focus on trade shows and technology expos as platforms for technological mediators of prison tech. These studies show how diverse social groups contribute to technological development in diverse and often unexpected ways Connecting to these earlier explorations of the long history of surveillance technologies controlling marginalized populations and unexpected technology mediators, we firstly map prison tech actors that gather at the expos and secondly identify dominant imaginaries of technological change and the criminal justice sector
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