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This systematic literature review synthesizes published sources from the ASIS&T Digital Library and the ACM Digital Library to develop a definition of the carceral state and to show how the term has been used in contemporary technology‐focused research. The carceral state concept has been adopted and applied widely in multiple areas of social scientific research to refer to the formal institutions of the criminal justice system proper and other social arrangements, ideologies, practices, and technologies that punish, surveil, and contain populations. Our review reveals a recent and increasing engagement with the carceral state in the collections surveyed. Encouraged by this increasing attention, this review is an attempt to introduce the carceral state as a guiding framework for tech‐society research and to consider implications for advancing responsibility, reflexivity, and care in the creation and evaluation of information systems, programs, and services.