Mooch made this comment while discussing how time appears to bend and warp while inside, only to flex unpredictably when rejoining the thrum of ‘normal’ life. He was illustrating the unimaginable length of a fellow prisoner's sentence, who had been inside so long the world had left him behind, oblivious to developments in the ice cream industry. Mooch had a compelling way of making the more abstract aspects of prison life tangible and often funny. A restless soul with itchy feet and fingers in many illicit pies, he found passing the time a challenge which preoccupied much energy, and ironically disposed of a lot of it. This was not his first sentence, though he swore it would be his last. He confided he had “one last big plan”, the cliché seemingly escaping him. His pad mate Harry – a good friend and co-d (co-defendant) who was unfailingly amiable and good-natured – and he would bet on the horses through the night,1 play cards or monopoly and affect blindness and deafness when one or other needed time to alleviate their respective frustrations. I was not convinced Harry had the better end of this arrangement, but their loyalty and companionship undoubtedly made the time go faster, and a little easier, for them both.

Occupying time was a constant preoccupation though methods and success were variable. Part of the challenge lay in the distorting effects of doing time. Temporality was experienced relationally. Time inside passed in dissonance with that on the outside, and between those who were moving and standing still, between those serving short terms and those whose sentence end was unclear, uncertain and thus rendered cruelly interminable. Listening to these dissonant, competing rhythms made the layered textures of time and its relation to the shifting sense of prison spaces audible.

“Pretending to press the brakes”

Prisoners reported experiencing time as strangely distorted and uneven, contrasting both within prison spaces and between inside and the outside. On the one hand, people reported feeling time passing speedily: “It does, the week flies by. If I was in another jail ppfftt” (Mooch). “It goes fast behind that door though Kate, very fast” (Lugs).