Abstract
American prisons are a black box: remote, austere, and cruel. Although basic demographic data about the people confined in prisons are common—that is, data on the number of people incarcerated, their age, or their race—there is little information available to the public regarding conditions of confinement. A natural response to this data deficit is to advocate for more of it. This Comment argues, however, that more data alone are unlikely to meaningfully shed light on conditions behind bars, at least when the data are tied to carceral sources. This Comment contends that data sourced from administrators, courts, and other entities invested in carceral institutions tend to downplay the harms associated with incarceration, while also normalizing prison as a natural and inevitable feature of social organization.
To understand how carceral data achieves this sleight of hand, this Comment explores the minutiae of prison conditions data and prison law doctrine. When administrators collect data on solitary confinement, how do they document isolation in prison? When a member of the public submits a freedom of information request, what documents about life behind bars are prison administrators willing to release? And, when courts publish opinions, how do they speak about abuses suffered by incarcerated people? In the weeds of data policy and prison law doctrine lie important epistemic insights about the ways the public understands (and misunderstands) prison through the data made available by carceral sources. In parsing the risks associated with conditions data, it is possible to find alternative ways to shed light on the nuances of life in prison. In other words, it becomes possible to begin the process of abolishing carceral data.
