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

Laura Piacentini; Elena Katz

doi:10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-0933

Auteurs-es

Laura Piacentini Professor of Criminology, The Schoolof Social Work and Social Policy, University of Strathclyde,
Elena Katz The School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-0933

Mots-clés :

Russia, prisoners, agency, social media, structure, absentism

Résumé

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 de-institutionalisation and re-territorialisation has produced a new penal imaginary - a carceral motif for the twenty first century - in the form of a virtual world.

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Bibliographies de l'auteur-e

Laura Piacentini, Professor of Criminology, The Schoolof Social Work and Social Policy, University of Strathclyde,

Laura Piacentini, PhD, FRSE is Professor of Criminology at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, University of Strathclyde. She is currently the Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange, and Associate Director The Scottish Centre for Crime and Criminal Justice, which is a consortium of the Universities of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Stirling and Edinburgh. She is Co-Editor in Chief of the leading Criminolgoy journal, Criminology & Criminal Justice. Laura has established expertise in cultures of punishment in Russia and has been engaged in empirical and theoretical work in the region for 23 years.

Elena Katz, The School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

Dr Elena Katz

Senior Researcher and Honorary Research Associate.

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