Doing time in old age: unsettling ethics in carceral circuits

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the proportion of older adults in Japanese penal institutions has risen dramatically, driven largely by high rates of recidivism. This trend has developed alongside growing social insecurity about crime, as well as anxiety about old age and care in a time of increasing neoliberal discourses of individualized risk and responsibility for maintaining health. This article examines the temporal dimensions of these changes and their implications for socially marginalized and criminalized older adults. Starting from Allison's concept of ‘dis‐belonging’ (muen) as being out of time with others, I describe how old age inequalities of belonging are produced by chronocratic regimes, and how heterochrony emerges within the contradictions of those regimes. I argue that as old age becomes increasingly subject to chronocratic violence, new rhythms of doing and being time's body are emerging. Drawing on fieldwork in the impoverished area of San'ya, Tokyo, I show how ageing is produced through rhythms of recidivism that entail both agency and possibilities for care. Older men in San'ya see carceral circulation as a way of striving for a good life in what they call ‘shaba’, or the world of suffering and endurance, and a way of making time of ethical potential in old age.