Digital bridges:

the transformative role of ICTs in prison psychosocial intervention during the pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic had an unprecedented impact on all spheres of social life, generating deep cleavages whose inscriptions in the psyche are still diffuse and difficult to apprehend from the perspective of the social sciences. Both the prolonged isolation, the curtailment of social life, the proximity of death, and the omnipresent experience of risk of exponential contagion created a strongly anxiety-inducing scenario where the uncertainty of the existential future became the main epochal anchor. However, within the unprecedented coordinates of strong turbulence and unpredictability in the times of COVID-19, due to its endemic confinement, prison contexts were one of the most vulnerable scenarios. In this framework of greater isolation, within INISA—the institution in charge of managing the deprivation of liberty of adolescents in Uruguay—video calls were enabled in an unprecedented way, an aspect that progressively became established as a tool within psychosocial technical teams. This article aims to problematize and systematize in an exploratory manner various experiences and hermeneutical categories associated with the use of techno-communication platforms as psychosocial intervention tools in prison settings.