Custodial Media: Carceral Handbooks as Infrastructures of Incarceration

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.