Content:

Prison Hashtags tells 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, which received the 2019 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice. He is also co-editor of the Justice, Inequality, and the Digital World book series with NYU Press.

Calvin John Smiley is a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College-CUNY and Roosevelt House Faculty Affiliate and the co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home (Routledge, 2020) as well as the author of the award-winning Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023) and Defund: Conversations Towards Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024).