“Urban experience” and “imprisonment” sound like an absolute contradiction between two mutually exclusive conditions. Prisons are, however, functioning parts of the cities, hiding the judicially excluded citizens or undocumented individuals from the city’s face. A significant element of punishment and control in most of the modern prisons have been to ban or control the prisoners’ access to media and communication devices, a strategy that works as a further layer of exclusion from the urban life.

Things have however changed with Internet. Smuggling mobiles in detention centers or having limited access to Internet in some more ‘open’ forms of detention, lots of prisoners around the world have been producing content and connecting to the rest of the city/world through media. One example is “Prison Blog”, a genre of blogging that have existed for almost two decades. This media opportunity has been seized by a few ‘insiders’ to communicate with the ‘outside’, with famous examples like Chelsea Manning, the American whistleblower who used to blog while in prison.Offering an outline of the specificities and the history of this genre of blogging, this paper investigates the forms of urban membership and urban experience new media offers to those who are judicially excluded from the urban life.