Digital carceral mobilities: Mobility and smuggled mobile technologies in prisons

Contemporary carceral systems function through the restriction of physical movement and the regulation of information flows, so how do prisoners’ smuggled mobile technologies renegotiate mobilities in carceral spaces? Grounded in the new mobilities paradigm and drawing on the concept of carceral mobilities, this study proposes the framework of digital carceral mobilities to analyze new possibilities of embodied and digital mobilities enabled using illicit mobile technologies in prisons. Using Lebanon's carceral institutions as a case study and based on digital ethnography of three Facebook pages, an analysis of recordings circulated by prisoners via social media and news outlets from 2020 to 2023, and a contextual interview with a former prisoner, the paper categorizes four key modalities of digital carceral mobilities: embodied mobility, mediated mobility, spatiotemporal mobility, and material mobility. This paper argues that prisoners renegotiate mobile technologies – both material and network – allowing them to relay their lived experiences and harsh conditions behind bars and explore new possibilities of movement within the carceral space. The framework of digital carceral mobilities demonstrates that mobility within carceral spaces is inherently paradoxical, functioning simultaneously as a pathway to potential agency, through enabling new possibilities of embodied and virtual movements, and as an extension of confinement under the guise of connectivity, by reinforcing the oppressive and socioeconomic inequalities of the carceral, political, and digital systems.