Doing time as an act of survival

As it is created by inmates in a county jail, time is a remarkably malleable phenomenon. Inmates must alter the meaning of hour, day, month, and year for self-preservation and to maintain social stability, whether they serve sentences that are long or short. They control time through a host of cognitive feats, including ignoring diurnal cycles by rolling entire weeks into single days, and through actions and activities that make time pass more quickly. In jail, as opposed to prisons, these efforts at time control are especially difficult because there are few diversions, making time spent in jail "hard" time. Mead's theory of time, in particular the intertwining of past, present, and future, reveals the social complexity of doing time in these conditions. Data were gathered through observations and interviews, and they are presented in a mixture of genres including autobiography and classical ethnographic analysis.