Locked In, Logged Out: Digital Participation of Residents in Danish Carceral Facilities

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Abstract
Digital tools are no longer supplementary features of modern life but constitutive to it, and exclusion from digital participation increasingly means exclusion from public services, employment, and social life. For incarcerated residents, this exclusion compounds existing disadvantages and undermines the reintegration process that penitentiary institutions are expected to facilitate. This is particularly consequential in Denmark, one of the most digitalized societies in the world, where all civic services are accessible only through digital infrastructures and the Danish Prison and Probation Service formally commits to digital inclusion as part of its rehabilitative mission. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with current and former residents, prison staff, and NGO representatives across different types of Danish carceral facilities, this article examines how digital participation is organized and governed through the analytical lens of positive (enabling) and negative (restrictive) security. The findings reveal a graduated, ladder‐like approach in which digital provision increases across facility types but arrives too late and too abruptly to constitute meaningful rehabilitation preparation. By conceptualizing digital participation as a security practice rather than a purely technological matter, the article argues that a more balanced integration of positive and negative security logics throughout the sentence (rather than their sequential alternation) is necessary for digital inclusion to meaningfully support rehabilitation and resettlement.

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