Civilising the Scaffold: a renewed carceral space in videoconferencing trials

In this article, I analyse the implication of the spread of videoconferencing for prisoners under pre-trial detention as a technology embedded in a process of civilising punishment by bureaucratising criminal procedure. This is specifically examined through a series of letters from Italian prisoners ‘engaged in struggles', held in maximum security from 2006 to 2020. From a situated perspective, the letters describe videoconferencing as a way of disembodying and recoding the space-time of the prisoners, reducing them to a simulacrum: a series of images, sounds and glances caught by cameras and microphones. This technology ensures, through a both material and virtual geographical solution, efficiency, and security but at the cost of increasing the distance between the judge, society and the accused.