Premium
Doing Time as an Act of Survival
Author(s) -
Scarce Rik
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2002.25.3.303
Subject(s) - ethnography , b theory of time , meaning (existential) , biography , phenomenon , cognition , control (management) , psychology , sociology , stability (learning theory) , period (music) , social psychology , epistemology , aesthetics , computer science , law , psychotherapist , artificial intelligence , art , political science , philosophy , neuroscience , machine learning , anthropology
As it is created by inmates in a county jail, time is a remarkably malleable phenomenon. Inmates must alter the meaning of hour, day, month, and year for self‐preservation and to maintain social stability, whether they serve sentences that are long or short. They control time through a host of cognitive feats, including ignoring diurnal cycles by rolling entire weeks into single days, and through actions and activities that make time pass more quickly. In jail, as opposed to prisons, these efforts at time control are especially difficult because there are few diversions, making time spent in jail “hard” time. Mead's theory of time, in particular the intertwining of past, present, and future, reveals the social complexity of doing time in these conditions. Data were gathered through observations and interviews, and they are presented in a mixture of genres including autobiography and classical ethnographic analysis.