I would absolutely consider prisons a technology, most obviously because we can see human societies where prisons are not a viable technology. If a member of a more primitive tribe starts killing people, the pragmatic solution is to kill them, not incarcerate them. Incarceration imposes technological (e.g. can you build buildings strong enough to hold people involuntarily?) prerequisites and high or extremely high logistical costs (see the cost of housing a prisoner for a year in the UK). You ultimately also need guards and the spare labour in society to be able to allocate to that task instead of potentially more important tasks, like obtaining food. Whether that is feasible will in turn be determined by human productivity in the various fields of production, in the case of food which is determined by the availability of agricultural technology (50% of the UK workforce used to be working on agriculture, now only about 2% to my recollection). Incarceration on the scale we see today is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Obviously such technology can be good or bad.
In my view the IT community falls into the trap of a narrow definition of the term, which now has been supplanted by an even narrower definition where technology just means "IT".
See the other thread above for my thoughts on the latter part. The adoption of a technology is done by the decision of a human. Nobody's claiming that computers have imposed themselves on society...
Obviously such technology can be good or bad.
In my view the IT community falls into the trap of a narrow definition of the term, which now has been supplanted by an even narrower definition where technology just means "IT".
See the other thread above for my thoughts on the latter part. The adoption of a technology is done by the decision of a human. Nobody's claiming that computers have imposed themselves on society...