Time as Transformation: Addiction Rehabilitation in Prisons

• In Event: Serving Hard Time: The Experience of Time in Timeless Places

Abstract

Many prisons now provide or require addiction recovery programs. These programs presume a Newtonian model of time that entails absolute and objective time that takes up the past as determining the present. This model, although common, limits the possibilities for transformation of what Heidegger called Being-in-the-world. This paper will highlight that sobriety entails not the cause-and-effect over time of treatment programs, but as transformation of Being. Bakhtin, a dialogical philosopher, posits that time entails not a Newtonian linear cause-and-effect, but as a here-and-now unfolding of possibility. He referred to this understanding of meaningful time as “chronotope” or the time-space ground for the unfolding of Being. This transformative unfolding in-time is not chaotic nor random, but instead entails what Bohm called an “Implicate Order” which organizes meaning into an indefinite extension which frames the possibilities of transformation within treatment. This paper will conclude with a model of change for addictions programs in prisons capitalizing on the possibilities for transformation for Beings in prison.

Author

• Elizabeth Snyder, Utah Valley University