The birth of the digital prison: Carceral state expansion in a digital age

Punishment and society scholars studying the dramatic increase in “carceral capacity” during the rise of US mass incarceration have tended to focus narrowly on prison construction. Drawing from research on digital punishment and the shadow carceral state, I shift attention instead to the expansion of carceral capacity through the creation of a new method of social control—digital incarceration—designed to annex and re-purpose infrastructure ostensibly built for telecommunications. The paper examines the little-known history of the birth of the digital prison in the 1990s, including organized market formation initiatives at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, design work at the telecommunications giant American Telephone and Telegraph, and marketing and implementation at Pro Tech, a small startup in Florida. I show that the infrastructural development of digital incarceration was planned in the first instance by private sector technologists and entrepreneurs working outside formal policy processes. Drawing on this history, the paper spotlights the dynamics of penal entrepreneurialism as a force of carceral state expansion in a digital age.