The Carceral Web we weave: Carceral citizens’ experiences of digital punishment and solidarity

Abstract

This article asks: How do formerly incarcerated people navigate digital technologies? Using the metaphor of a spider web, I use 18 months of ethnographic observations of formerly incarcerated women of color to argue that formerly incarcerated people must contend with what I call— Carceral Web—the spatial intersection between carceral institutions and digital technologies. I identify two primary features of the Carceral Web: stickiness and entanglements. I characterize stickiness as the Internet’s ability to make carceral histories inescapable across time and physical space, making it impossible for formerly incarcerated people to shed their criminal histories. I characterize entanglements as the intersections of institutional carceral relationships that result from practices and norms of digital connectivity. I argue that the pervasive significance of digital connectivity to everyday life compels formerly incarcerated people to contend with the Carceral Web, but stickiness and entanglements make them susceptible to exploitation and reincarceration. I call the Carceral Web’s production of vulnerable subjects predation, which I characterize as a type of hidden sentence. I contend that despite having limited resources to navigate predation, formerly incarcerated people are tasked with co-opting the Carceral Web to build solidarity and training as a self-defense survival mechanism. Understanding the Spider of the Carceral Web as the convergence of corporations and state interests allows us to see how it feeds on the lives of formerly incarcerated people by consuming their marginalization and exclusion in the interests of racialized and gendered profit.