Nonlinear Temporality and Histories of Trauma in Incarcerated People

• In Event: Prison Working Group: Prison perceptions, experiences, and transcendence

Abstract

Time in prison is a core component of the punishment and a practical and philosophical matter for incarcerated people. This paper uses data from 53 oral history interviews with formerly incarcerated lifers and long-termers in California to ask how pre-carceral and carceral trauma exposure and trauma responses influence the experience of prison time. Prison is a temporal microclimate, a space where the lack of normal ways to mark progression allows for nonlinearity to become the dominant temporal orientation. It is argued that prisons shape a new temporal reality that exists almost exclusively in the present, in a cyclical approach to time that is constrained to a weekly repetition of tasks (O’donnell, 2014; Carceral & Flaherty, 2021). But even when prisoners schedule as much programming as possible, they will always endure long stretches of unscheduled time. How does having that much empty time to live in memories that are potentially highly informed by trauma exposure lead to rumination and temporal dislocation? Two functions of nonlinearity meet in the carceral setting: the nonlinearity of confinement and the nonlinearity of trauma. Due to the nonlinearity of trauma, the traumas of the past are not bound to the past and can often surface through triggers and periods of inaction. This paper reconsiders the extent of the predominance of the “present” in prison in the light of the nonlinear time ruptures and cyclical patterns of trauma responses.

Author

• Joanne DeCaro, University of California - Irvine