“Disconnected, Interrupted, Tied in Knots”: Communicative Capture in U.S. Prisons

Abstract Extensive research shows how the state deprives captives of social interaction across prison walls as a form of punishment. However, little is known about the function of expanded communication access through reforms such as reduced-cost phone calls and “free” digital tablets in U.S. prisons. Drawing on interviews with formerly imprisoned men and loved ones of currently imprisoned men in New York state prisons, this article argues that prisons do not solely deprive captives of communication: they simultaneously facilitate communication across walls as a form of social control—a process termed “communicative capture.” Through prison communication technologies such as phones, tablets, and letters, the state provides necessary, intimate connection while expanding control over the labor sustaining captives and their communities. Prisons carry out communicative capture through overlapping mechanisms of surveillance, resource extraction, and pacification, which interlock to regulate the labor of social reproduction. The findings reveal the contradictions of social reproduction in the context of imprisonment, where the state simultaneously restricts and facilitates life-saving communication to sustain captive populations and reproduce the prison regime.