Prison Hashtags: Incarceration, Reentry, and Digital Identity

The pivotal role of social media in understanding how justice-impacted individuals reconcile the past, establish the present, and project their future mediated lives

What does it mean to be incarcerated in the age of social media? At any given moment, there are close to 2 million people incarcerated in American prisons and jails. This population is detached from friends, family, and, historically, from most technological advances. In the early 2010s, digital technology, particularly social media, experienced tremendous growth across the world, as more and more people began to spend time in these spaces, cultivating online personalities across a variety of platforms.

In Prison Hashtags, Jan Haldipur and Calvin John Smiley tell the story of incarceration and reentry in America as seen through the images, videos, audio, and words of a group of people trying to make sense of it all on social media. For over six years, Haldipur and Smiley conducted a digital ethnography of the social media carceral landscape. They take an in-depth look at what they call the “social media-incarceration cycle,” and how folks both in prison and returning to society post-incarceration utilize social media. Platforms like Instagram are often used to create community and network, as a public-facing digital journal and archive of their carceral odyssey, as well as a means to become entrepreneurs, activists, and so much more.

Ultimately, Prison Hashtags offers an innovative understanding of the role that technology and social media can play in the lives of those who have served time behind bars.

Jan Haldipur is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of No Place on the Corner: The Costs of Aggressive Policing.

Calvin John Smiley is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College-City University of New York. He is the author of Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition and co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home.