Overview

How digital technologies entrench state power—and a new vision for resistance As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital policing requires confronting the political and racial logics that sustain police power. Drawing on digital media theory, science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and carceral theory, The Carceral Surround reveals how twenty-first-century policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. Carceral power now operates across every register of daily life through predictive analytics, risk modeling, and algorithmic systems that track, sort, and preempt. From social media archives and facial recognition software to satellite mapping and radiation sensors, Scannell charts how seemingly disparate media converge into an environment of control that links technocratic governance to the maintenance of racial hierarchy and capitalist order. Tracing today’s technoauthoritarian regime from the NYPD’s assault on Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s campaign to end predictive policing contracts, The Carceral Surround is a rare hybrid of critique and refusal, illuminating the digital logic of US authoritarianism while imagining pathways for collective resistance beyond its grasp. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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9781517921255

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Reviews

""Departing from Fred Turner's figure of the democratic surround, R. Joshua Scannell theorizes the convergence of racial liberalism and technologized policing in the United States. With a powerful combination of political commitment and scholarly rigor, The Carceral Surround shows how computation and policing became integrated--and how that integration extends far beyond hardware and software expressly developed for use by the police."" --Seb Franklin, author of The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value

Author Information

R. Joshua Scannell is assistant professor of digital media theory at The New School. He is author of Cities: Unauthorized Resistance and Uncertain Sovereignty in the Urban World.

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