The Virtual Reality of Imprisonment: The Impact of Social Media on Prisoner Agency and Prison Structure in Russian prisons

Abstract

Prison agencies around the world are reporting a rise in the use of illicit communication devices in prison. Nevertheless, there have been no criminological studies examining prisoners' online behavior. Using Russia as a case study, this paper reports findings from new research on prisoners' illicit internet use and the effects on prisoner agency and prison structure. Our main finding is that Russian penality sits at the nexus of two processes. First, penality is de-institutionalised whereby the prison, discursively speaking, is no longer fixed to a built form. Second, penality is reflexively re-territorialised by placing prisoner agency onto a third space. The paper presents a new conceptual framework of prisoners as absent, which reveals Russian penality as culturally contingent and politically resilient. The interplay between deinstitutionalisation and re-territorialisation has produced a new penal imaginary -a carceral motif for the twenty first century -in the form of a virtual world.

Monitoring Prisons in Europe: Understanding Perspectives of People in Prison and Prison Staff

“…These findings also speak to the work of Piacentini andKatz (2017, 2018) by providing a rare examination of how prisoners feel about their rights in one of the most sensitive areas of penal experience, indicating a discordance between formal rights protections and their views. More fundamentally, they lend credence to Armstrong's (2018, 411) position that human rights structures can, perhaps unintentionally, enhance the grip of penal power: "[N]ow that such frameworks and standards have taken hold and come to be the means of understanding good penal policy and practice, it is timely to consider their productive capacity."…”

“…By solely focusing on the state response to determine the effectiveness of prison monitoring, we may obfuscate the ways in which monitoring bodies have the potential to legitimize and validate practices that warrant more critique (Karamalidou 2017;Piacentini and Katz 2017;Armstrong 2018;Mehozay 2018). This research therefore raises questions in the longer term as to what the repercussions may be of a prisonmonitoring body legitimizing a practice by establishing its limits.…”

“…This absence speaks to a wider lack of analyses of the experience people living and working in places of detention have of human rights protections in places of detention (Murphy and Whitty 2007;Piacentini and Katz 2017;Armstrong 2018). Assessments of human rights monitoring in prisons currently prioritize the voices of state and supranational bodies over those most directly affected by human rights implementation.…”

Doing time online: Prison TikTok as social reclamation

“…(2020) used TikTok accounts as case studies to analyze “dark” online subcultures, and Habibi and Salim (2021) analyzed 40 videos posted over an 8-week period to understand the impact of user engagement on TikTok by noting views, likes, shares, saves, and comments. More broadly, analyses of social media use in prison and its associated punishments have created what Piacentini and Katz (2018) call “a new penal imaginary – a carceral motif for the twenty-first century – in the form of a virtual world” (p. 183).…”