ABSTRACT
Prisons have disappeared and with them the people inside. While once prisons used to be built in urban centers across the United States, where their foreboding structures and specter of hidden horrors once held disciplinary power, they are now, and increasingly over the past forty years of mass incarceration, built far away and out of sight. They are also more difficult to access publicly, let alone represent through media in terms uncensored by prison officials or unsensationalized for entertainment. Such opacity lends itself to a pervasive assumption among many who seek prison reform: that the problem of public acquiescence to mass incarceration operates in direct proportion to this ‘unseeing.’ The logic goes as follows: if only the public actually knew what was going on inside today’s prisons, or if only we could better expose the violence happening in today’s spaces of detention, then the same public might be animated to demand that that violence end.
