Michael Hardt /// Prison Time

Prison time is the obvious form of punishment in our society. Freedom, that is, the control of our time, is conceived as the keystone and the most coveted possession in modern society, equal to all. By an inscrutable logic, then, the paradigm for punishment is the loss of this most precious asset that all possess equally: time. Prison takes our time in precisely determined quantities. Like the equations between labor-time and value, our society sets up an elaborate calculus familiar to all of us between crime and prison-time. Theft of a car equals six months; sale of illegal drugs equals five years; murder equals ten years. The concrete crime is abstracted, multiplied by a mysterious variable, and then made concrete again as punishment in a precise quantity of time. The calculations are utterly arbitrary (they do not even have the horrible metonymic correlation of cutting off a hand for theft), but, while we may question relative values on the two sides of the equation, we seldom doubt the viability of the calculus itself. Punishment equals time. Its logic is simply obvious from within our modern society. Through the prison, power is invested directly into time as a series of disciplines, regimentations and orderings. Time is the measure of power, and once a sovereign power has our time it is loathe to let it go. (Genet tells us, for example, that the corpse of a certain inmate was not given over to his family but had to remain temporarily in the prison because he still had three years left on his sentence.) Power in our society is above all power over our time.