ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the media scarcity of incarcerated populations by challenging the common conception that prisons are structured by a media or digital divide. Although prisons are typically imagined as technologically sparse or empty, they are in fact significant spaces of technological innovation and experimentation. By contrast, the framework of a divide suggests a gap between the incarcerated and media. We argue rather that carceral power systematically controls media to oppressively structure the storytelling and communicative agency of incarcerated individuals and groups, committing ongoing harms and injustices while also obstructing collective pathways for commiseration and decarceration. The chapter argues that the divisiveness of prison media and communications should be reimagined and refashioned into a track - a counter political infrastructure that can guide the work needed to enact media scarce politics founded on anticolonial principles. We explore one articulation of this path forward through an analysis of Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s Why the Caged Bird Sings (2015), a nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) song writing collaboration with primarily incarcerated Indigenous women in Canada.
