Time in prison

A few posts ago, I mentioned that not many of the men I interviewed for my PhD told extended stories. I figured that this was partly because it is difficult to answer a very open question asked by a  stranger with extended answers.

Another problem, though, was the topic of the stories I asked them to tell. Despite the many TV series set in prison (Prison Break, Orange is the New Black, Porridge, etc) the experience of imprisonment does not seem to easily lend itself to a good yarn. Many of the men described the more dramatic events in their lives, like their arrest, with rich, almost cinematic, detail, even though this was not the focus of the interview. But they found it much harder to talk about their life in prison. In the words of some of the participants:

That hour in the visiting room it’s a long time, there’s a lot of uncomfortable pauses of silence because you’ve no got much to talk about cause like it’s like ground hog day in here, every day during the week is the same and every week-end is the same, see you’ve no really got much to talk about at a visit, know what I mean, you end up big uncomfortable pauses of silence.

There have not been any/ no, there have not been any special moments this sentence. Every day is just another day, humdrum.

Prison is a deprived environment for the creation of stories. When the routine is exactly the same every day, without variation or much incident, there is little to tell. This lack of narrateable material might well be another of the pains of imprisonment, and partly explain why some prisoners feel that they do not mature during their time in prison.

An article[1] I recently read gave me another way to think about this.There is a primary and a secondary experience of time. The primary experience is the experience of time while it is passing. This is the one that the men talked about when they said they could make time pass more quickly by being busy – having activities helped to ease boredom and sped things up. There is also a secondary experience of time, which is our time perception when we look back on certain periods of our lives. Monotony leads to a slow primary experience, but a quick secondary experience. In other words, monotonous time passes slowly when we live through it, but when we look back on it, it seems to have gone by in a flash, because there are no memories to hold onto – no stories to tell.

I wonder what could be done to enliven prison life? On the one hand, routine can be comfortable – none of us would like to be forced to change town or jobs every year, and neither, I assume, would prisoners like to be moved from prison to prison or work detail to work detail, just to break up the monotony. On the other, a greater variety of experiences might mean that people do not find life in prison interminable looking forward, and empty looking back.


[1] Van Zuuren en Doets (2013) Doing time: A qualitative study on time perception during detention. Netherlands Journal of Psychology, 68, 64-74.