Technology and Prisons: Innovation in Question

Contributed by the Ecole nationale d’administration pénitentiare Département Gestion et Management

Technology is omnipresent in our daily lives; its use has become commonplace and its limits less and less questioned. Redefining our relationship with time and space, it is often presented and perceived as promoting productivity and giving us a sense of freedom, immediacy, and ease. The appeal of technology is not new, and it’s growing all the time; this is particularly true of security technologies, which are increasingly present in public discourse, policy, and practice.

This article looks at the deployment of technology in penitentiary environments through a socio-technical approach that goes beyond a functional study. It is based on a reflection from my doctoral thesis on the privacy of incarcerated persons in Québec provincial prisons, which led me to question technology as a potential solution to intrusive practices. The text that follows is an extension of this reflection to the French penitentiary context and invites readers to question the use of technology in prisons: beyond their functionalities, what do they produce? It does not seek to engage in what would necessarily be a sterile and reductive debate for or against technology”, but attempts to offer an analysis that goes beyond the material aspects of technology to understand it in all its complexity.

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