The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison

by Michael G. Flaherty, K. C. Carceral

Overview

Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time.

Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate’s time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231203456
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	02/22/2022
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

K. C. Carceral (a pseudonym) was incarcerated for thirty-one years in twelve different prisons until his parole in 2013. He is the author of Behind a Convict’s Eyes: Doing Time in a Modern Prison (2004) and Prison, Inc.: A Convict Exposes Life Inside a Private Prison (2006).

Michael G. Flaherty is professor of sociology at Eckerd College and the University of South Florida. He is the author of A Watched Pot: How We Experience Time (1999) and The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience (2011). He is a coeditor of Time Work: Studies of Temporal Agency (2020).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Temporal Regime
2. Time and Space
3. Temporal Allowances
4. Serving Time
5. No Future on the Horizon
6. Marking Time
7. Resistance and Temporal Agency
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

An imperative to include within a corrections course, introductory sociology course, or an introductory criminal justice class. It would be appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Contemporary Sociology

This collaboration between an accomplished convict criminologist and a leading sociologist of time presents a thorough exploration of the ways prisoners experience time. But it does much more: it helps the reader appreciate the many facets of time in all human lives and confront the many unnoticed ways that time shapes our thinking and being.

Joel Best

Michael Flaherty proves himself, once again, a masterful scholar of time with this fascinating addition to his oeuvre. He and coauthor K. C. Carceral’s focus on the ironic juxtapositions and contradictions of incarcerated time yields brilliant and provocative insights into the relationships between time, autonomy, socially constructed meaning, and ultimately power. Anyone who has suffered the temporal experience of being caged by the COVID pandemic will find this a revealing and personally relevant read.

Patricia A. Adler

In addition to appealing to researchers interested in the sociology of time, criminal justice, and symbolic interaction, the unique nature of collaboration and co-authorship between Carceral and Flaherty in this excellent book could prove beneficial in courses on qualitative methodology as well.

Symbolic Interaction

A book about prison life with a difference: immensely insightful, extraordinarily sensitive and impressively scholarly. Over a ten-year period of collaboration between a long-term prisoner and an academic, the experience of prison is interrogated through the lens of time. With this focus the authors achieve not only a deep understanding of what it means to ‘do time’ in prison but manage, simultaneously, to illuminate this taken-for-granted aspect of everyday life on the outside, where the generally intangible time emerges with great clarity.

Barbara Adam

Prisoners’ experience of time is unique and worth studying in greater detail. The Cage of Days provides a thoughtful window into how convicts experience time behind bars. Carceral and Flaherty are experts, and they are able to blend insider and outsider perspectives, autoethnography and scholarship, very successfully. Highly recommended.

Jeffrey Ian Ross