Abstract
This article argues that if we want to fully understand how the future of prisons will unfold, we must critically interrogate the “new normal” of the evolving Pandemic State and associated advanced technological tools and trends, toward digital surveillance, digital authoritarianism, polarising new media and community policing. Moreover, this article argues that carceral citizens, and the low socio-economic communities they come from, will be disproportionately affected by social and economic inequalities aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath. Here in Australia, access to safe, secure and affordable housing will continue to be a particular hot spot issue, due in part to neoliberalist Australian government policies and funding cutbacks that have left the disadvantaged, especially women, exposed to illness, violence, poverty and homelessness – thus, increasing their risk of (re)incarceration. At the same time, evolving, digitised tracking and compliance means and methods are extending the reach of the Pandemic State into the lives of the most vulnerable and “at risk” communities, including the formerly incarcerated and yet to be incarcerated. New theorisations will be vitally necessary to fully explain these evolving interconnections in a neoliberalist future which will be both after prisons and after pandemics, and thus this paper deploys (im)mobility theory as a tool to explain this global, social and cultural shift toward “security” as the dominant value of the new “lockdown” society – trends which may continue long after the virus is under control. This paper also provides illustrations from film and popular culture, particularly through the science fiction metaphor of “Pre-crime” or anticipated crime, to render these theorisations and the cultural shifts they capture more accessible for a wide audience of academics and practitioners. This paper concludes that it is especially important for corrections education to critically scrutinise the evolving applications and impacts of mobile and digital technologies over carceral citizens – technologies which can facilitate, as well as impede, the physical and social mobility of vulnerable persons in the emerging unequal, punitive, lockdown society.