ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I draw on the concept of penal abolition (the ideal of a world without prisons) to argue that criminalization is inhibiting our work to build more socially just communities. Contending that penal abolition logics need to inform thinking about the implementation of new information and communication technologies, I use the specific case of behavioral biometric technologies to show how new communication technologies serve to strengthen entrenched prison logics driven by incarceration. The chapter begins by drawing on scholarship on rituals of communication and security to accomplish two goals. The first is to problematize the notion that communication processes have the possibility of being transparent and error-free. The second is to consider how feminist approaches to human security might pave the way for centering penal abolition in our work on surveillance, while demonstrating that we must do so by using an intersectional approach. After reviewing the growth in the prison industrial complex and articulating why penal abolition must be central to efforts to think through security, I conclude with a brief case study of the ways in which gender and race are coded into biometric behavioral technologies.