abstract: Carceral handbooks are an obscure yet significant set of material artifacts and practices that reshape how we think about media. While media studies scholars have contended that carceral facilities are a medium or test bed for technology, handbooks written for and distributed to incarcerated people are understudied. These are examples of what I call custodial media . Through a focus on Immigration and Customs Enforcement's National Detainee Handbook and counter-media produced by activist-artists, I show how custodial media perform an epistemic practice and orchestrate the services incarcerated people must engage in to maintain the media infrastructures of their own incarceration.
B. A. O. Williams (Thu,) studied this question.