For Years, Prison Life Was Isolated From Tech. Now Tech Is Beginning to Define It.
One evening in July 2020, I paced around the house, on the phone with my grandmother. The coronavirus pandemic had suspended visitation at the jail where my uncle was incarcerated, but they had just introduced video calling, and she was trying to figure out how to schedule and pay for a call. We didn’t know it at the time, but my grandmother had only a few months left with my uncle. Those video calls—however imperfect, expensive, and clunky they may have been—facilitated some of the last moments they spent together.