Ethnographic Reflections on Event-Time in Jail

Abstract

This chapter marshals ethnographic data from county jails in southern California to examine how a penal environment shapes the ways prisoners experience time, track time, and orient themselves to the past, present, or future. Building from research that conceptualizes the ordering of social behavior according to “event” or “clock” time, it is argued that incoming prisoners experience a disorienting incongruity between clock time in free society and event time in jail. Temporal congruity is conceptualized as another kind of social need like identity verification, group inclusivity, and other basic social needs identified by social psychologists. Additionally, and in part because penal time was organized around events, prisoners use somewhat idiosyncratic quality-of-life events to create timetables and thereby break indefinite time into manageable segments. Finally, a relationship between self-efficacy and temporal orientation (past, present, or future) is shown with the argument that as self-efficacy increases, so does the likelihood of prisoners being oriented to the future. On the other hand, the lower the self-efficacy, the greater the likelihood of an orientation to the present. Given the findings, it is recommended that jails operate on more conventional time schedules with regular access to natural light. This work has implications for the sociology of time as well as future studies of punishment.