<div>
<p>New information and communication technologies (ICTs), such
as cell phones, email, and social media, have been transforming how social
movements recruit, organize, participate in collective action, and experience
repression. Yet, limited scholarship has addressed the uses of these
technologies by social movements organizing within American prisons. Using a
dialectical interpretive approach, I examine how a coalition of prisoners’
rights organizations uses ICTs to plan and participate in collective resistance
across prison walls. The coalition, referred to here as the New Prisoners’
Rights Coalition (NPRC), organizes against low and no-wage prison labor,
unhealthy and unsafe prison conditions, and inhumane prisoner treatment. The NPRC
has a multi-platform public digital presence and mobilizes prisoner activists
and free activists. Through narrative description, I summarize the ways NPRC
activists use ICTs from December 2013 through September 2016, noting changes in
ICT use over time and in response to movement repression. I find that new ICTs
offer innovative ways for NPRC activists to record and document their
environments, communicate privately, and communicate publicly. ICTs, however,
do not remove all barriers to activism or ensure that activists’ concerns are
resolved or even taken seriously. NPRC activists struggle to overcome stigma
and mischaracterization online. They face physical repression, interpersonal
hostilities, institutional sanctions, economic repression, legal sanctions,
interpretive repression, surveillance, and monitoring. In different
circumstances, the NPRC responds to repression by increasing ICT use,
decreasing ICT use, going dark, migrating from one online platform to another,
and shifting digital responsibilities from prisoner activists to free
activists. I explain how, most of the time, the digital unreachability of the
prison environment makes it difficult for NPRC activists to substantiate their
claims of mistreatment, abuse, and injustice. Moreover, I consider how current
prison technology policies may be inadvertently pushing NPRC activists into difficult-to-monitor
online spaces and exacerbating safety concerns of corrections workers.</p></div>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8038931 |
| Date | 11 June 2019 |
| Creators | Jacqueline N Henke (6632246) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/Prisoners_Rights_Activism_in_the_New_Information_Age/8038931 |
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