Time unbound: Nonlinear temporality and structural trauma in prison time

A growing literature establishes the experience of prison time as cyclical and present focused, but my analysis of trauma suggests that prison time can be heavily influenced by the past, especially through social, multigenerational traumas. Drawing from oral history interviews and 5 years of ethnographic data with formerly incarcerated lifers and long-termers in California, this paper explores how pre-carceral and “compounded structural traumas” influence the experience of prison time. This paper makes three contributions to the study of the lived experience of punishment: (1) a new analysis of carceral trauma experiences to include compounded structural traumas; (2) a new temporal analysis of carceral permeability through the concept of trauma-produced prison time; (3) the use of the case study method to integrate multigenerational identity into understandings of the carceral experience.