Tag Archives: prison

Final Project: DH in Prison

Here are excerpts from my project proposal. If you want to read the whole proposal let me know and I’ll share it with you.

Photograph from Vera Institute of Justice Reimagining Prison Report

In view of the devastating effects of mass incarceration in the United States and in an effort to address the needs of incarcerated people as they rebuild their lives, I propose to design and develop an undergraduate college-level course in digital skills and digital humanities to be taught in prison. Although education is a powerful tool for successful reentry, only 35% of prisons in the United States offer college courses at the present time.[1] Digital humanities are hardly taught at all. An environmental scan of college programs in prisons shows a low occurrence of digital humanities courses in curricula largely due to a scarcity of hard and soft infrastructure to support digital work and because incarcerated people are generally forbidden access to the internet. This gap, or digital divide, presents us with an opportunity to build a course that does not exist at the present time and to innovate through exploring ways to teach specific digital skills without an internet connection. By developing minimal computing software we will create course materials easily exportable to low-tech environments around the world. We will produce a course curriculum, syllabus, lesson plans with datasets, open source documentation and a project website.

This project comes at a time when the field of Digital Humanities is turning from seeing itself under a big tent to being under no tent. Teaching digital humanities and digital skills in prison is an opportunity to share the work we do in the field of digital humanities with a population that on one hand, given its disadvantages, will benefit greatly from having a digital edge and on the other hand will add new perspectives and contributions to the field of digital humanities, expanding its scope by bringing the interests and concerns of communities traditionally underrepresented in digital humanities to the fore.

Photograph from Vera Institute of Justice Reimagining Prison Report

Photograph by anonymous

[1]Bender, Kathleen. “Education Opportunities in Prison Are Key to Reducing Crime.” Center for American Progress, March 2, 2018.

See also Reimagining Prison Report. Vera Institute of Justice, October 10, 2018.

Network Praxis: Shock Incarceration in New York State 2008-18

I had a sneaky feeling that my dataset wasn’t going to work for network analysis, but I had found such a good dataset that I decided to try. This is an Excel spreadsheet compiled by the New York State Department of Corrections listing 602,665 people incarcerated in New York State over the last ten years, with information about admission type, county, gender, age, race/ethnicity, crime and facility. I knew six hundred thousand records were too many, but I figured I’d select just a few, and analyze the networks I would find in these.

The “few” records I selected were those of 771 men and women sentenced in 2018 to shock incarceration, a military-style boot camp initiative that was supposed to reform incarcerated people by subjecting them to strenuous physical and mental trials. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, shock incarceration involves “strict, military-style discipline, unquestioning obedience to orders, and highly structured days filled with drill and hard work.” The data I looked at shows that most people in these facilities were incarcerated for drug-related offenses such as criminal sale of a controlled substance (CSCS) or criminal possession of a controlled substance (CPCS). When marihuana is legalized the population in these facilities – and others – should, I hope, drastically decrease.

I fed the 771 records into Cytoscape and it was a total mess. I tried analyzing only the 106 women sentenced to shock incarceration in 2018 and that was still a mess. The main problem, I realized, was that I could see no clear relationships between the men and women listed in my data other than the relationship they have with the facility in which they are confined. I don’t know who hangs out with whom. I don’t know if people sentenced for different crimes are placed on different floors. It would be too much work to find out who transports the food to the facility and how many guards there are and so on. Frustrated with my project, I saw that trying to get data to bend to software is a lousy way to go about things. I started to think instead about what software would help me explore the data in a meaningful way and decided to see what I could do with Tableau. This was such a good choice that I’m having a hard time stopping myself from building more and more visualizations with what became a wealth of information when I stopped looking for networks that weren’t there.

I couldn’t embed Tableau Public in WordPress so I paste pictures here, but you can’t click and scroll and interact with my visualizations here, and some of the pictures are cut off so please visit my visualization on Tableau. By the way, I was happy to remember that students can get Tableau Desktop for free for a year. Here’s the link: https://www.tableau.com/academic/students

First, here is the mess I made with Cytoscape (I didn’t even try to figure out how to embed):

Isn’t that horrible?! Here’s a close-up:

And here are pictures of what I did with Tableau:

Phew, that’s all for now. See it on Tableau, there’s no comparison.