This article explores the use of web cameras inside a local penal facility in
Phoenix, Arizona through which jail detainees’ daily routines were
broadcast on the Internet over a two-year period. I question whether and how the
logic behind broadcasting these penal images and the actual practice of capturing
and distributing such images may indicate a significant change in the penal
enterprise. In the end, I suggest that this phenomenon further reshapes contemporary
penality into a form of visual entertainment commodity, and as such, may be
converging with several other social transformations to fundamentally reconfigure
the penal subject.
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