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The growing use of digital evidence from smartphones and social media has led to a digital divide in the US criminal justice system that advantages law enforcement and prosecutors while further increasing the vulnerability of poor people and people of color who rely on public legal assistance. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study of one of the first digital forensics laboratories in a public defender office, I argue that digital inclusion in the form of better resources for public defenders is necessary for equitable and fair representation in today's criminal justice system. Findings show that access to digital forensic technologies is an important equalizing tool that allows public defenders to (1) mount strong, data-driven cases; (2) create counter narratives that challenge depictions of marginalized defendants as dangerous; and (3) engage in nuanced storytelling to highlight the complexities of human relationships and life circumstances that shape cases.

This article introduces the concept of carceral communication to focus attention on the role of communication in mass incarceration's racialized, criminal justice process. To argue that a communication perspective helps explain how individuals, neighborhoods, and prisons are linked together, the article uses publicly available indictments that charged three New York City youth gangs with violent crimes. It identifies three facets of carceral communication to demonstrate how and why mass incarceration is a communicative phenomenon. First, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become the most sought-after type of criminal evidence because of its visibility and permanence. Second, law enforcement uses the interpersonal communication and neighborhood networks of incarcerated Black men for crime control and surveillance purposes. Third, carceral communication operates as a communication feedback process, in which marginalized, young, Black men under surveillance know they are being watched and respond to that surveillance with resistance that is also subject to criminalization.