Advancing Corrections Journal - Edition #20 - Scholarly Reflections on Core Considerations for Correctional Practice | Article 19 (ACJ20-A019)

 

This contribution examines how the growing digitization of prisons reconfigures proximity, the corerelational dynamic between staff and incarcerated persons, by transforming how closeness is experienced, enacted, and bounded. Drawing on ethnographic research in Belgian prisons, it analyses how digital infrastructures such as in-cell phones, tablets, and prison platforms reshape the interactional fabric of detention. The contribution conceptualises proximity across three dimensions - spatial, relational, and experiential - and demonstrates how each is altered by the rise of digital tools. While digitization enhances efficiency and autonomy, it simultaneously erodes the informal, embodied, and affective exchanges that underpin dynamic security and humane prison life. Officers’ discretion is redefined as their work shifts from “street-level” to “screen-level” bureaucracy, producing what we term proximity without presence. We further highlight the emergence of new inequalities in digital access and competence among both staff and incarcerated persons. It concludes with policy recommendations for integrating technology in ways that preserve relational knowledge, face-to-face contact, and the legitimacy of prison authority. Ultimately,digitization does not simply modernise imprisonment: it rewrites its relational core.

 

Keywords: Proximity; Digitization; Staff-prisoner relationships

 

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