The chronopolitics of carcerality: Weaponizing and contesting temporalities under Lebanon's penal laws

This article examines how incarceration is governed through time and how prisoners negotiate that governance through smuggled mobile phones and illicit communication networks. Taking the case of Lebanon as an optic and drawing on prison cellphone recordings circulated between 2020 and early 2026, read alongside penal and procedural law and two contextual interviews, the article develops the concept of chronopolitical carcerality. The concept captures how punishment operates through legal classifications of time, procedural delay, suspended legal status, and financial barriers to release. The analysis identifies four vectors of temporal control: fractioning of penal time, through uneven sentence calculations and exclusions; rhythmic control, through the acceleration or stalling of legal and administrative procedures; temporal immobilization, through prolonged waiting and pre-trial detention; and time commodification, through fines, fees, and prison costs that convert money into time detained. The article then shows how prisoners use recordings, voice notes, hunger strikes, deadlines, and media circulation to make these temporal harms visible and to pressure institutions to respond. By centering prisoner-produced media, the article contributes to scholarship on carceral temporality, chronopolitics, and carceral geography, while showing how prisoners in Lebanon name, measure, and contest the time imposed on them.