When Streaming Came to Prison

For more than 25 years, I’ve been in prison, where TV is a staple of prison life as essential as staff and more immutable than any rehabilitative program. Cell-block televisions are equal parts library, time machine, and mecca, instructing the incarcerated in the ways of the world they aspire to return to. Traditionally, most prisons have a communal TV, though some also sell personal TV sets. In every prison I’ve been in, the communal TV is placed in the day room, with tables and chairs nearby. Popular TV events like the Super Bowl can create a real sense of community. In 2020 the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections began distributing tablets in my facility through a contract with the prison telecommunications giant ViaPath (formerly known as GTL). The tablets connect with a server that contains a limited number of movies and TV shows, which are preapproved and edited so curse words are altered and characters who show too much skin are blurred out. When tablets were passed out in my facility, prison day rooms—the places where people once gathered to watch TV, play cards, use the communal phone, get medicine from med techs, and eat—started to empty. In my facility, many people voluntarily locked themselves in their cells, absorbed in their tablets. 

[Lyle C. May is an incarcerated journalist and an Ohio University alum. His writing has appeared in Scalawag Magazine, America Magazine, Perspectives on Politics, and other publications. His book Witness: An Insider’s Narrative of the Carceral State is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in April 2024.]