`Doing Time': The Extended Present of the Long-Term Prisoner

Abstract

The prison as a coercive and relatively closed community offers one of the best representations of the way in which values of time depend not only on their absolute length but on the nature and intensity of their qualities. This research note compares perceptions of time revealed in the autobiographies of discharged British prisoners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the conclusions of another study regarding the temporal perceptions of prisoners in the 1970s. Long-term prisoners in both periods experienced an extended sense of the present and a distortion of the past and future.