Time-as-Justice: Aristotle, Hegel, Rehabilitation and Punishment

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

Abstract

In Aristotle's conception of time, time is linked to change and movement. As beings in relation, prisoners who “serve time” find themselves in an unchanging environment and thus “out of time”. In Hegel’s theory of the zeitgeist, a person cannot move beyond the bounds of the age in which they are confined. Prison serves as social control that also temporally quarantines chaotic agents from that age. The separation is temporal and physical, removing the offender from society by limiting possibility and opportunity. The “time served’ then exists in a separate time continuity from the rest of its age.
Prison is a way to quarantine chaos, so is this quarantine punitive or corrective? The answer may be in the direction of temporal conception and movement as well as examining fundamental assumptions about the common reductions of the concept of justice. Justice is a reduction as a concept because it reduces everything to terms of reciprocity. Yet, this presents a problem with proximity. This paper seeks to answer fundamental questions about the temporal passage of time in prison, as well as fundamental answers to questions about justice and how we conceive it as a society.

Authors

• Gretchen Monson, Utah Valley University

• Daren Elmont, Utah Valley University

• Chantell Shapcott, Utah Valley University

• Tasha Young, Utah Valley University