Working toward a larger project on how we frame communication problems in theory and practice, I'd like to reflect briefly on a recent academic article about the problem of mass incarceration to illustrate how a certain practical way of talking about problems implies a certain concept of communication and vice versa.
"Mass incarceration" refers to the fact that the United States, since the 1970s, has imprisoned more people relative to population than any other country, and that people of color, especially Black men, are vastly overrepresented among those prisoners. (As the graph above shows, the numbers have gone down a bit in recent years.) Lane and Ramirez (2024) have studied this problem from a communication perspective. They introduce the term, "carceral communication, to explain the interconnection between communication, digital traces, and surveillance to link individuals, neighborhoods, and prison for poor, Black Americans overrepresented in the criminal justice system" (p. 675).
To document this phenomenon of carceral communication, Lane and Ramirez analyzed the sources of evidence for specific acts that were cited by prosecutors in a sample of publicly available criminal indictments against youth gang members in New York City between 2010 and 2014. They found that a large majority of specific acts cited in the criminal indictments consisted of social media messages or posts, and recorded phone calls with prisoners. Here are the main findings of the study as summarized in the article's abstract:
First, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become the most sought-after type of criminal evidence because of its visibility and permanence. Second, law enforcement uses the interpersonal communication and neighborhood networks of incarcerated Black men for crime control and surveillance purposes. Third, carceral communication operates as a communication feedback process, in which marginalized, young, Black men under surveillance know they are being watched and respond to that surveillance with resistance that is also subject to criminalization. (p. 674)
The authors describe their study as an exercise in reframing: "By reframing the racial–spatial problem of mass incarceration ... through the concept of carceral communication, we present it as a communication and technology issue" (p. 687). That's a good description as far as it goes, because the study reveals how social media platforms and the routine practice of recording prison phone calls provide law enforcement with technological means of accessing interpersonal communication networks for purposes of surveillance and investigation.
What I want to emphasize in addition is how this way of describing the process of mass incarceration implies a social-systems model of communication. In this model, there is a complex set of elements––gang activity, related flows of interpersonal communication, police surveillance of those interpersonal flows targeting poor black communities through technological means such as accessing social media platforms, and feedback processes in which police monitoring leads to resistance (e.g. deleting social media messages) which itself can be criminalized (e.g. as destroying evidence), all leading to criminal prosecution and incarceration––and these elements all operate together to form a self-perpetuating system. This is a communication problem that has little to do with "miscommunication" or other common ways of talking about failures and difficulties in communicating. Rather, the problem is a system of communication that contributes to bad outcomes (criminal activity, racialized mass incarceration), and this way of framing the problem invites reflection on forms of action not for "improving" communication but for intervening to disrupt and change a dysfunctional system.
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