Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Instead of punishing the flesh, the time of one's life is seized and destroyed.As Michel Foucault has already impressively described, the ideas about appropriate punishment and the historical changes can tell us a lot about modern society, about power, control and discipline.But what exactly happens during this period of incarceration?Seen from the outside, it may be a time in which crime is closed and criminals can be made invisible.From the inside, however, it is by no means a non-time or off-time in which people simply wait.Something happens during this time, with the prisoners as well as with time itself.These are also the questions guiding the research conducted by the authors of The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison: "It is the aim of our project to understand how prison inmates experience and modify time.We want to know what time does to them and what they do to time" (p.5).The we is a special feature.K. C. Carceral (a pseudonym) spent 31 years in prison for murder, Michael G. Flaherty is Professor of Sociology at Eckerd College in Florida.Both have also previously dealt with temporality in their respective lifeworlds and after a letter from Carceral to Flaherty in 2010, a peculiar collaboration developed.The two focus on the same object from two very different perspectives (p.5), and I feel it is important to emphasize the uniqueness of their collaboration.Differences in perspectives are usually very productive, but it is also difficult to establish a common understanding time and again.We know this from heterogeneous research teams, especially in empirical research.This is also the case when people form the academic field and those from the social field exchange ideas, as the same subject matter can appear very different from different perspectives.In the case of prison, it would have been impossible to create a long-term prison sentence experienced firsthand, with all the existential conditions.Even conducting interviews or observing on
Source: Human Studies
Author: Alexander Schmidl
Institution: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,090
OpenAlex ID: W4402871121