Explicit!: Coding Carceral Censorship and Social Biases in United States Prisons

Social practice artist Sue Jeong Ka’s ongoing digital database, Coding Carceral Censorship (CCC) (2019-), charts the United States carceral system’s publication censorship. Ka made data categories to track the knowledge production that US prison book bans target and why. Concentrating on the most common justification for this censorship, sexual explicitness, her initial data analysis reveals restrictive penal trends that devalue women’s and East Asian sexual speech via romance/erotica literature and manga bans, respectively. These patterns reflect how national white cis-hetero-patriarchal values play an outsized role in determining which types of expression the government protects and prioritizes. Our article argues that through its capacity to identify such under-examined censorship patterns, CCC underscores Digital Humanities’ (DH’s) potential to intervene in and interpret the prison industrial complex’s social biases. CCC’s data indicate that US prison bans enact these biases through excessively barring content by and about marginalized groups, thereby impeding incarcerated people’s access to socially marginalized perspectives and authors. In framing CCC as both critically made DH and part of Ka’s socially engaged art, we further suggest that her database illuminates how DH and socially engaged art practices can be mutually enriching.