Performing from Under Penal Gaze: Examining What Incarcerated People Post to TikTok

The prison walls previously keeping the lives of inmates private from the general population had been largely successful. In recent years, the creation of the internet and the accessibility of social media has transformed the way we can view and interact with the incarcerated population. Since the introduction of the social media app known as TikTok, the experience and lives of inmates have been posted and consumed by a larger portion of the population outside of academia. Within these videos inmates can express themselves through performance of culturally popular trends, their lives within prison, and establish identity in a place that traditionally has been stripping of any personal characteristics. In this paper, I analyze a collection of video data from Tik Tok which depicts different ways in which inmates decide to share their experience to the world. In the analysis, I compare the ways that these inmates are displaying their pains of imprisonment by asking what pains of imprisonment are reflected in the videos? This question will be supported primarily by comparing the contemporary pains of imprisonment that I collected and comparing those pains to the pains of imprisonment that are accounted for in the ethnographic study of New Jersey State Prison conducted and written by Gresham M. Sykes in 1958. Then, I analyze what ideas about punishment are reflected in the comments within these videos. This question will be supported by the comments section found on the prison TikTok videos. Lastly, I evaluate them to see what type of ideologies and opinions are reflected in the general population, particularly regarding the fundamental purposes of punishment