Abstract
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.
Introduction
The current literature on prison time revolves around discussions of incarcerated people shaping a temporal reality that exists almost exclusively in the present (e.g. Carceral and Flaherty, 2021; Carr and Robinson, 2022; Middlemass and Smiley, 2016; O'Donnell, 2014). It is generally agreed that upon acclimating to prison, incarcerated people adopt a new circular, repetitive, present-focused temporal reality to avoid fixating on unknown and unplannable futures. Within this theory of the circular present of prison, how an individual's past might influence the present is primarily drawn from discussions on incarcerated people savoring happy memories of the past during the early difficult adjustment period (Marti, 2017; O’Donnell, 2014). How traumatic past memories might influence the circular present of prison is underexplored, with some exceptions, by prison time scholars.
This paper presents an argument for trauma-produced prison time, using data pulled from a larger study on lifers and long-termers in reentry in California that also includes providers, family members, and social networks. In this 5-year study, I conducted in-depth oral history interviews with 53 individuals (conducted over 4 years and routinely including multiple follow-up interviews), collected over a thousand hours of ethnographic participant observation with hundreds of participants, conducted a 41-person survey, interviewed providers, observed reentry healing circles, and collected audio diaries and social artifacts. The data used in this paper are from the oral history and ethnographic participant observation study data, and I present my arguments using the theory-generated case study method (Simons, 2020).
This paper argues that trauma changes how we understand the past in prison time scholarship, reshaping both how time is experienced in prison and where the temporal boundaries of the prison lie. In particular, this paper is concerned with forms of trauma exposure that are structural in nature and how these “social” and “structural” traumas can temporally overlay and alter the prison experience (Galtung, 1969; Hamburger, 2021). I will present how “compounded structural trauma,” alongside personal traumas, produces a new understanding of prison time—what I term “trauma-produced prison time.” I will dispute the logic of the prison as an isolated temporal space of the unending circular present and present how “trauma-produced prison time” adds a temporal dimension to the theory of carceral permeability (e.g. Aviram, 2024; Miller, 2021). This paper will make three contributions to the study of prison time and 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.
Expanding prison time beyond the walls
Prison time scholars maintain that incarcerated people shape a new temporal reality that exists almost exclusively in the present (e.g. Carceral and Flaherty, 2021; O’Donnell, 2014). Days are no longer progressively used up as one checks off goals; instead, they revolve through a weekly repetition of tasks (Cohen and Taylor, 1972). Prison time shifts from society's linear and future-oriented approach to the institution's cyclical and present-oriented approach, which I term “standard prison time” (Carceral and Flaherty, 2021). Focusing on the day-to-day set of weekly tasks in a nonlinear perpetual present can work for many as a way to battle the psychological pitfalls of excessive rumination in prison. But even when incarcerated people schedule as much “programming” (e.g. school, self-help classes) as possible, they will always endure long stretches of unscheduled “dead” time. How does having that much blank time to potentially relive the memories of your past reshape you, and what happens when those memories are highly informed by trauma exposure?
Current theorizations of prison time (i.e. standard prison time) are underdeveloped in how they conceive of trauma and trauma responses. In general, the past is considered to play a limited role in how time in prison is experienced. O’Donnell (2014) and Marti (2017) discussed the use of daydreaming to live in happy memories of the past, which psychologists refer to as reminiscence within the concept of “savoring” (Bryant et al., 2005). O’Donnell noted that incarcerated people lose the ability to recall and be nourished by these memories. O’Donnell presented three stages in the temporal experience of incarceration: tumult, tedium, and trepidation. 1 The initial stage of tumult, when incarcerated people exist in a liminal state between the “real world” and the carceral present, is when O’Donnell conceived of the past strongly influencing an incarcerated person's conception of time. When incarcerated people make it to the middle and longest state of tedium, O’Donnell argued that their memories of the past have faded. O’Donnell's interpretation of the pre-carceral past's potential to influence the present is primarily drawn from the incarcerated person's ability to recall positive memories of the past. O’Donnell did consider how post-traumatic growth is a possible outcome of the process of self-reflection during the long stretches of “dead time” in solitary confinement, while also acknowledging that “madness” and “muddling through” are possible stages or outcomes of the experience.
This paper builds on O’Donnell's conception of prison time by exploring how nonlinear trauma responses interact with O’Donnell's three stages of prison time by potentially stranding people in variations of what O’Donnell referred to as “madness” or “muddling through” (e.g. ruminating or being overwhelmed with trauma responses) for significant parts of their sentence beyond the initial adjustment period. Additionally, this paper will briefly integrate how four forms of temporal coping identified by O’Donnell (reduction, removal, reorientation, and reinterpretation) are connected to common trauma and coping responses discussed in this paper.
Michael Walker's (2022) concept of “hard-timing” in jails is an analysis of prison time that dives deeper into how trauma responses influence prison time. Walker argued that incarcerated people attempt to repress the “thick fog of negative emotions weighing upon you from the inside out” such as “the anger, the fear, the frustration, the shame, the guilt” (p. 175). Walker described how triggers, big or small, will push people beyond the limit of what they are able to repress, and they will slip into what he called “hard-timing.” Hard-timing is “a period of emotional breakdown—when your endurance strategies have failed you, and you feel an overwhelming mixture of diffuse anger and diffuse sadness” (p. 175). I build on Walker's argument, linking hard-timing to emotional suppression, rumination, and emotional dysregulation (e.g. bouts of uncontrollable anger and sadness), which are common responses to trauma (Seligowski et al., 2015).
More broadly, in prison sociological scholarship, how incarcerated people's individual pasts might influence outcomes in prison, such as suicide attempts, is explored in discussions of the deprivation, importation, and combined models (e.g. Crewe, 2007). In the deprivation model, maladaptation to the prison environment is the result of the restrictive prison environment. In the importation model, incarcerated people import pre-established psychological characteristics, values, and behavioral patterns, which alter their prison outcomes (Dye, 2010). Prison scholars now gravitate towards a combined model that stresses the relationship between individual characteristics and the prison environment (Dye, 2010). In particular, Goyes’ (2024) recent scholarship theorizes how pre-carceral traumas negatively shape the personality traits of incarcerated people, which are imported into the prison and, in combination with prison pain and deprivation, can heighten the risk of prison suicide. Goyes’ scholarship is emblematic of an area of prison scholarship at the forefront of prison trauma research—prison suicide—and offers a novel theorization of how trauma functions within the combination model. This paper builds on Goyes’ scholarship by exploring additional mechanisms for how pre-carceral personal and social traumas intertwine with the prison experience.
Carceral geography scholarship is a different branch of prison sociological scholarship concerned with the boundaries and exchanges between the prison and the free world. Within this field, there is a lineage of thought on the permeability of carceral spaces, with the early prison scholarship of Foucault's (1975) “carceral archipelago,” Clemmer's (1940) “prison community,” and Goffman's (1961) “total institution” serving as some of the core texts for later critiques and responses (e.g. Baer and Ravneberg, 2008; Farrington, 1992). The permeability of carceral spaces is a perspective that acknowledges the continuity and flow between the inside and outside of carceral spaces (Aviram, 2024). Recently, scholars like Wacquant (2009), Evans and House (2024), and Fischer-Hoffman (2022) have argued for the permeability and continuity between prisons and the “free world” in diverse theoretical and empirical approaches, such as the continuity between the “dark ghetto” and carceral apparatus, the inside–outside community organizing during COVID-19, and visiting spaces as sites of prison porosity and border enforcement. There is also an emerging strand of research on the temporal “afterlife” of prison (Miller, 2021), which includes works such as Moran's (2012) embodiment of prison in the reentry process and McNeill et al.'s (2022) theory of enduring temporalities. Trauma-produced prison time builds upon carceral geography scholarship to argue for the temporal permeability of prison in relation to structural and personal traumas, which subvert both temporal and geographic boundaries commonly associated with prison. In the next section, I review how time functions differently in communities and families with structural trauma lineages to lay the foundation for a new theory of prison time that is deeply interlocked with outside communities through the process of communal trauma.
Trauma and temporality in communities
Western modernity assumes the dominance of teleological time—that time and society are moving forward towards progression (Carceral and Flaherty, 2021). Scholars of Black, Indigenous, and queer studies present alternative temporal orientations that account for these communities’ foundational violences, intergenerational and historic trauma, and pre-Western modernity temporal orientations. Black studies’ scholars have long theorized alternative trauma-informed intracommunity understandings of time, such as the “traces” of the plantation (Du Bois, 1899) and the “afterlife” of slavery (Hartman, 2008). Indigenous studies’ scholars reclaim the existence of indigenous temporal orientations alongside White settler orientations (e.g. Rifkin, 2017), which encompass the ancestor and the descendent in the same temporal framework (e.g. Curley and Smith, 2024). Queer studies’ theorists deconstruct temporal orientations rooted in reproductive life cycles and present an alternative present-based temporal orientation grounded in the communal trauma of the AIDS crisis (e.g. Halberstam, 2005). Trauma and temporality intersect when exceptional violence and structural and symbolic violence merge to form an experience of time in which the past, present, and future interlock, causing each age to bear, alter, and maintain previous ages (Thomas, 2011).
Geoff Ward's (2016) concept of “microclimates of racial meaning” explores how communities who carry the legacies of historic ethno-racial violence produce a “microclimate” of shared racial experience and identity. For communities deeply scarred by the exceptional violence of the past and existing in a present society that actively works to silence and erase those foundational violences, the hegemonic narrative of progressive time and social advancement does not align with their own perceptions of how long histories of violence and trauma live and breathe within their own present-day communities. These microclimates of racial meaning can also be thought of as microclimates of interlocking time, in which identity and temporality are altered and maintained through the layering of past, present, and future times. These microclimates produce their own shared reality in which past violence is a highly time/identity/society-altering aspect of reality. In this paper, I apply Ward's concept of group identity as a “microclimate” shaped by shared past traumas to incarcerated people, who often share personal and communal lineages of targeted, systemic violence and trauma—lineages that often include their racial identity but are not limited to it.
In this paper, I employ clinical and sociological definitions of trauma and adjacent terminology (e.g. Herman, 1992; Moulds et al., 2020). The clinical definition of trauma is the exposure to a traumatic event (singular or a series) and the subsequent development of trauma-related symptoms, like depression or post-traumatic stress symptoms (SAMHSA, 2024). Trauma is generally conceived as both the clinical definition above and a more colloquial definition of it as a personal and collective open wound (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009). This paper is primarily concerned with forms of social trauma, which is considered both a group of post-traumatic disorders caused by organized societal violence or genocide and also the study of long-term social processes on the family, group, and inter-group level that results from the original group trauma (Hamburger, 2021). At a collective level, after group trauma events (e.g. civil wars and genocides) trauma responses (e.g. post-traumatic stress symptoms) can be passed down both biologically (i.e. epigenetics; Yehuda and Lehrner, 2018) and through cultural processes, such as cultural scripts, to become embedded in group identity (Alexander, 2004). Inversely, trauma denial and repression also function at the larger social level (Herman, 1992).
Within the realm of social trauma, this paper is especially concerned with “structural violence” and the resulting “structural traumas” (Galtung, 1969). In Galtung's (1969) definition of structural violence, he divided violence into the personal and direct on one hand and the structural and indirect on the other. In this paper, I divide trauma exposure in the same manner: between the personal/direct and the structural/indirect. Within the concept of structural trauma, I look at three common forms of structural trauma that often share the same original social trauma event source (e.g. the transatlantic slave trade, Indigenous American genocide and assimilation) and discuss how they can be evaluated together in what I term “compounded structural trauma.”
Compounded structural trauma interweaves three established forms of structural trauma within trauma studies: intergenerational trauma, historic trauma, and community trauma. For people of color, these three traumas are often overlaid by ethno-racial trauma—the everyday trauma of experiencing and witnessing discrimination, violence, and intimidation directed at ethno-racial minority groups (Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019). Intergenerational trauma occurs when some of the effects of parental trauma transfer to children, often through limited parenting capacity rather than a recitation of trauma events (Bradfield, 2011). These children come to possess “wounds” without memory of the trauma, which produces a sense of “void, terror, woundedness, and loss that defies all comfort” (Laub, 1998: 509). Historical trauma is the re-experiencing and remembrance of collective traumatic events by a community over multiple, extended generations (e.g. Brave Heart et al., 2011; Duran and Duran, 1995). Historical trauma is distinct from intergenerational trauma because intergenerational trauma does not necessarily include a shared group trauma source (Mohatt et al., 2014). Community trauma is acts of aggression outside the home among people who may or may not know each other (e.g. Ralph, 2014; Seth et al., 2017). Living in a community in which these harmful acts regularly occur, even if you do not witness and are not directly impacted by the acts, produces community trauma.
Some common ways that people can respond to structural and personal traumas are rumination and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Rumination is when an individual repeatedly and unproductively dwells on a particular theme, such as past negative events or one's negative emotions (Moulds et al., 2020). Intrusive rumination, which is when negative thoughts repeatedly enter your mind without your control, is particularly associated with increased negative psychological outcomes (Stockton et al., 2011). Higher levels of rumination are associated with negative or dysfunctional strategies of emotional regulation among incarcerated people (Choi et al., 2024) and are also associated with higher levels of suicidality (Morrison and O’Connor, 2008). However, deliberate reflective pondering, which involves purposely turning inward using problem-solving and meaning-making, has been found to be associated with post-traumatic growth (Stockton et al., 2011).
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-related intrusive memories, which can occur as full-sensory flashbacks, briefly cause people to painfully “relive” past traumas as if presently real. PTSD-related intrusive memories can also occur as single-sensory intrusions. A person might not even realize that the single-sensory intrusion is connected to trauma, but it can still greatly alter their emotional state and lead to maladaptive coping strategies, like substance use and hypervigilance (Edwards et al., 2006; Van Der Hart and Friedman, 1992). 2 Male prisoners in the United States have seven to 10 times higher rates of PTSD than comparable rates in the general population (Wolff et al., 2014). Additionally, high levels of personal and structural trauma responses can contribute to an elevated allostatic load, which can contribute to an array of long-term negative health outcomes (e.g. Murkey et al., 2022). In this paper, I will bring theories on communal trauma's influence on temporality and knowledge on common trauma responses to the extant prison time literature to produce an amended theory of trauma-produced prison time.
Methodology
This paper draws on data from interviews with 53 oral history participants who experienced long-term incarceration; interviews averaged 2.5 h in length, and many included follow-up interviews and observations over the course of 4 years, totaling over 135 h of interview data. 3 In addition to conducting interviews, I conducted more than 1000 hours of participant observations with hundreds of lifers and long-termers in the reentry process in California over a 5-year period. I regularly attended community events (e.g. celebrations, plays, and welcome home events) and spent extended periods of time (e.g. regular visits over multiple years) with participants one-on-one or in small groups as they navigated reentry challenges (e.g. grocery shopping, health complications, and bureaucratic challenges). Participants are mainly people who were sentenced to indeterminate life sentences in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) but who were ultimately found suitable for parole by the parole board and governor and are currently on parole. My sample focused on lifers paroled in the Southern California area, recruited primarily through community events at reentry facilities in California. Since 2017, in California, there are roughly 1000 lifers released from prison every year. 4 In my ethnographic practices, I regularly interacted with 100 to 200 newly released lifers/long-termers per year, of which I would have multiple or sustained interactions with roughly half, equating to roughly 5% to 10% of the population to produce an overall sample of significant population saturation.
I coded the oral history interviews using a grounded theory of qualitative coding to produce an adaptable list of 70 codes organized around the main themes of personal trauma, structural trauma, identity, trauma effects, and healing effects (e.g. Chun Tie et al., 2019). The oral histories were twice-coded by two members of the 10–12-person study team for accuracy and internal consistency. When applicable, oral history data are combined with the longitudinal participant observation data on participants to triangulate data and produce more comprehensive data on participants. All participants in this study gave consent for their oral histories to be housed in a public archive and/or for the participant observation data to be used for research purposes. 5
In total, 94% of participants experienced one or more structural traumas that form the concept of compounded structural trauma in this study, and about two-thirds of participants (66%) experienced two or more. Over half of oral history participants experienced the structural traumas of community trauma (81%) and intergeneration trauma (64%). Additionally, 47% of participants experienced ethno-racial trauma, and 26% experienced historic trauma. There is a wide range of structural trauma sources present in my participants, from international conflicts, such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and Argentina's Dirty War, to the historic processes of disenfranchisement and dispossession experienced by historically disadvantaged populations in the United States, such as in Black, Latinx, and rural communities. Overall, the four structural traumas of community, intergenerational, historic, and ethno-racial traumas were coded in a similar frequency to personal traumas in the 53 oral histories, and in some oral histories, like the three presented in this paper, they were the primary forms of trauma discussed. 6
In this paper, I focus on three in-depth case studies pulled from the 35 participants (66% of total) who experienced multiple structural traumas to expand theorization on compounded structural trauma, tracing how compounded structural trauma influences prison time. In addition to exemplifying high levels of structural trauma, the three selected case studies also had lower levels of personal trauma. In selecting these cases, how prison time is influenced by compounded structural trauma is clearer. However, this does not preclude the case study participants from having also experienced personal traumas, like their life sentence crime event or personal violence against them. In these participants, personal traumas are not the predominate forms of trauma exposure nor the predominate sources of trauma responses discussed in their oral histories. I also conducted extensive follow-up interviews and ethnographic participant observations with these participants, providing a wealth of longitudinal data.
I use the theory-generated case study method because it allows for a deep analysis of the rich historical and familial context of these subjects, which is necessary for the multigenerational and historically dependent forms of theory I construct in this paper (Feagin et al., 1991; Simons, 2020). My methodological practices and theoretical interventions align with the pursuit of integrating and elevating the carceral subjects’ multigenerational and communal identity with their present-day carceral identity to better understand carceral experiences. Tracing cultural and familial lineages requires the presentation of a detailed, context-rich multigenerational examination of a select number of subjects in lieu of decontextualized experiences from a wider array of subjects. I position the case study method as the superior analytical method for multigenerational investigations into carceral subjects.
The oral history data used in the case studies are subject to a general limitation of interview data in social sciences, which questions the veracity of this type of information. However, pushing aside positivist notions of the “truth” can draw attention to how the narratives created in these oral histories “help us understand the complex nature of values, identities, cultures, and communities” (Sandberg, 2010: 448). As an oral historian, it is standard practice to accept someone's story as their truth of their experience without conditions. Doing so offers participants an opportunity to make meaning through narrative. Some traumatic events discussed in the oral history process can even be “spoken into existence” for the first time during the narrative process by turning fractured memories into a cognitive narrative (Felman and Laub, 1991).
Compounded structural trauma and trauma-produced prison time
Two functions of nonlinearity meet in the carceral setting: the nonlinearity of confinement (i.e. standard prison time) and the nonlinearity of trauma. The nonlinearity of trauma is a core component of the study of trauma and trauma disorders. Due to the nonlinearity of trauma, traumas of the past are not bound to the past and can often surface in periods of inaction, through triggers, and can overlay the whole experience of prison. This paper reconsiders the supremacy of the state of “present” in prison and adds to the field's current understanding of prison adjustment in the light of nonlinear time ruptures and long patterns of trauma legacies.
In this study, I identify three means in which the past can greatly influence the circular present of standard prison time and generate trauma-produced prison time. The first is through rumination, which mentally transports the incarcerated person to predominately living in and in response to painful memories of past. The second is through PTSD-related intrusive memories, in which someone can consciously or unconsciously temporally reexperience aspects of traumatic memories and their associated maladaptive coping patters. Finally, for some people, especially people of color and other marginalized populations, prison is an experience entirely overlaid with the continuation of their ongoing “compounded structural trauma.”
My label of “compounded structural trauma” unifies three distinct but often interrelated forms of structural trauma (historic, intergenerational, and community) by foregrounding how marginalized populations often experience the three traumas in concert with one another because they share the same original structural trauma event, such as transatlantic slavery, a civil war, or a genocide. The concept of compounded structural trauma often includes ethno-racial trauma, but it is not required—there are forms of structural trauma that are not ethno-racial in nature, such as anti-queerness. Compounded structural trauma is passed down in immediate and extended families, within communities, and is often the structural underpinning of the exterior violence in neighborhoods. It can be inherited in families through biological processes (e.g. Yehuda and Lehrner, 2018) and social processes (e.g. Goyes, 2024) and inherited in communities through social and cultural processes (Alexander, 2004; Hamburger, 2021). For example, in families and communities, generations of children removed from the source event can inherit trauma through epigenetic changes and through trauma-impacted parenting practices, cultural scripts, and personality formation (see Goyes, 2024). Communities with long legacies of structural violence are likely to experience high levels of both personal violence and structural violence, producing in turn high levels of both personal and structural traumas (Galtung, 1969).
My participants are likely to have acquired high levels of cumulative stress (e.g. high allostatic load), produced through a combination of personal and structural traumas as well as other environmental factors. I theorize compounded structural trauma as both a nonlinear layering of structural trauma exposure and responses and an additive accumulation of structural trauma responses that contribute to the subject's cumulative trauma and cumulative physiological stress. In this theorization, while the varied forms of structural trauma (community, historic, intergenerational) might be transmitted by different people and environments throughout the subject's life course (e.g. family, neighborhood, prison), what unites them is their connection back to the same original group trauma event (e.g. the transatlantic slave trade). As more exposure to these structural traumas occur in various environments and through various mechanisms (e.g. damaged parental bonds, cultural scripts, personality formation), their effects combine and compound into “compounded structural trauma,” which in turn contributes to their overall life course cumulative trauma and cumulative physiological stress.
The overlay of compounded structural trauma on the carceral experience is a core intervention of this paper. My intervention demonstrates the far edge of the permeable nature of prison time and space. It is not just recent traumas and nearby communities that can influence prison time and space but also hundreds of years of social and structural traumas produced in sites with origins potentially far removed from the physical site of the prison. The following three case studies demonstrate the concept of compounded structural trauma and how this trauma presents in carceral settings and in turn trauma-produced prison time.
The cases
Case study 1
Leonard is a 79-year-old Black man who spent 54 years of his life incarcerated in California. 7 He went to prison at the age of 24 and came out at the age of 78. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1939 and lived there until he reached 21 years of age. His mother gave birth to her first child at the age of 12 and was married to Leonard's father at the age of 13. Leonard's father was a day laborer who himself was incarcerated for attempted homicide, sentenced to a chain gang, and then successfully escaped the chain gang. Leonard grew up in the heart of the Jim-Crow-era South and left it for the West a few years shy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birmingham campaign.
Case study 2
Luke is a 53-year-old Black man who served 33 years on his life sentence. He is originally from Texas but was raised in Bakersfield, California. In Bakersfield, he grew up with his mother, stepfather, and three siblings. He joined a gang, a local chapter of the Crips, at the age of 12, in which he witnessed and participated in violence from a young age. He first went into the California Youth Authority at the age of 13. He was released at 16, but 2 months later, he was recommitted for auto theft. When he came out again at 18, he was only out for 6 months before his life sentence crime occurred. From the age of 13 to 52, Luke spent a total of 8 months outside prison walls.
Case study 3
Tuan is a 42-year-old Vietnamese man who served 22.5 years on a life sentence. Tuan was born in Vietnam one year after the fall of Saigon. His mother gave birth to him in a field beside their house. In 1978, his family, like so many others, had to flee Vietnam or face prison reeducation camps. At the age of 2, he became a refugee and spent the subsequent 6 years moving from refugee camp to refugee camp across four countries. When his family settled in Los Angeles, they initially moved into a heavily Hispanic neighborhood in East LA, adding to Tuan's now ingrained sense of cultural and social isolation. As a young teenager, Tuan joined a Southeast Asian gang in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles.
Compounded structural trauma beyond prison
In this section, I use the case studies to explore the concept of compounded structural trauma, which demonstrates how this nonlinear trauma is absorbed through relationships to family, community, and society.
Leonard's home of Birmingham, Alabama, is a key site of historic racial violence in America, from the day its first slave plantation was constructed to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Birmingham has a legacy of terroristic social control, in which the state uses spectacles of violence, intimidation, and reprisal to maintain status quo race relations over centuries (Petersen and Ward, 2015). In Leonard's narrative, White supremacist terroristic social control continues unabridged from his father's generation to his own. His father, who was born in the late 1880s or early 1890s, would tell Leonard “about when he was a boy how slavery was supposed to have ended but a lot of people in the South still had secret plantations where they kept slaves” and that his father was forced to work on a chain gang. One of the many ways Leonard personally encountered racial social conditioning extorted through violence and death was when the Klan attempted to abduct him: You could be walking the street at night and no telling what happen. You needed a gun. And one night it did happen. I was 19 at the time […] I was walking by the park and a car pulled up and the guy asked me could I show him where an address was. I don’t guess he knew I was 19 and I don’t imagine he thought I had a weapon. When I came up to the car, and he opened the car door, this white guy, a middle-age guy, about 45 or 50, he tried to snatch me into the car.
Luke's young vision of the world and his position within it was shaped by his mother's past traumas. Luke states, “I was raised by my mother to hate or dislike white people. I was told they were the devils and they ain’t no good.” She would repeatedly tell him: “Stay away from white folks. Don’t let them in my house. Don’t talk to them.” His mother would never name the source of her hatred and trauma but would tell him statements like, “I grew up around racism and I’ve seen what these crackers will do. Just because of who you are they will lynch you.” Luke pieced together that she was the “victim of something that she never talked about” and had “a deep hatred for allowing them [White people] to get close to her.”
Luke is unable to name the trauma his mother experienced. Instead, he senses the “void,” the “terror,” and the “woundedness” that intergenerational transmissions of trauma produce (Laub, 1998). Not only is the visible impact of the trauma, her fear and hatred of White people, passed on to her son, but so are the many subtle ways trauma can reconstruct a person's identity and relation to others, including his mother’s style of cohabitating and parenting, which are described as harsh and mercurial. Luke's mother also carried her historical trauma from the South to the West. People's stories of racial violence move with them, so that their legacies can end up far from their source, which can complicate measurements of historic racial violence and its legacy (Ward, 2016). The legacy of lynchings and other forms of racial terroristic social control in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s is transported to Bakersfield through the trauma imprinted on Luke's mother and later overlays Luke's experiences in prisons in California. Like Leonard, these various forms of structural traumas share the same original group trauma source, the transatlantic slave trade, and layer and compound for Luke over the course of his life.
The experience of being a refugee, of being homeless, stateless, and deprived of cultural continuity, left an indelible mark on Tuan as a boy. He says he experienced a very low level of self-esteem because “from two all the way to eight, [he] always felt rejected” as a refugee moving from refugee camp to refugee camp in country after country. Tuan experienced the social and structural traumas of dislocation and dispossession after the original group trauma event of the civil war. His life was not valued to the same level as a citizen as he was ejected from a series of countries. Tuan's family's status as refugees created an environment in which isolation and a sense of rejection pervaded: “I feel like I didn’t had the care and need that I deserved from my parents. […] It was tough. I honestly thought my parents didn’t love me.” Tuan wishes his parents would have discussed with him and his siblings the challenges they were all facing as refugees. The void created by missing or misunderstood individual and familial memories, and the subsequent erosion of a healthy family unit, significantly affected Tuan's basic relationship with the world. Tuan's experiences as a young refugee, his parent's intergenerational trauma, and his gang's shared social trauma combine and compound. These three case studies offer an entry point to trace how structural traumas intertwine over the subject's life course to form “compounded structural trauma” and exert great influence on the carceral experience. In the broader pool of 35 participants who experienced forms of compounded structural trauma, other structural traumas include Indigenous American genocide, anti-Latinx discrimination, antisemitism, and rural deprivation.
Compounded structural trauma in prison
Prisons function as sites of sustained structural oppression and violence against minoritized populations. The race-based atrocities and injustices that shaped Leonard's youth re-manifest in what Leonard describes as the “killing fields” of San Quentin. He asserts correctional officers (COs) gave “inmates knives to attack Black inmates” and he discovered that some COs were members of the Klan. After the prison system hired the first Black CO, he immediately asked what could one Black CO do to change an institution so heavily ingrained with racism? He says about COs being Klan members, “That's what we had to go through. We had to go through all that through in the 60s and the guys told me during the 50s they went through it.” Leonard views prison as another facet of American society determined to use any means necessary to keep Black men “in their place.” Leonard absorbs the trauma of the men before him (the men incarcerated in the 1950s) and places it within his own experiences of race-based trauma exposure in his present of 1960s and 1970s at San Quentin. Prison is a key feature of the afterlife of slavery, another microclimate where the legacies of chattel slavery are viscerally experienced by people trapped in a more modern system of racial control.
Leonard's experiences before his arrest, during his trial, and during his incarceration are all deeply interconnected for Leonard—the trauma of these experiences interlocking for him. Leonard talks about the reality and unreality of that much unrelenting racial trauma: “the Jim Crow-ism, the racism, the assassinations of Black prisoners. I saw all that. It's, it's, like you’ve seen it and you didn’t see it.” Leonard simultaneously saw and “didn’t see” the Jim Crow of the “past” existing in the present of the prison. It was there for him, alive and well within a prison in California in the late 1960s and 1970s, but of course, it could be argued by others that “Jim Crow-ism” did not exist in that time (post-Jim Crow) and place (the West coast). He sees the racial terror of the past and present converge and does not see it because that continuum can be daunting to be explained and believed. Leonard says his experience with “the system” turned him into “a very bitter young man” who “didn’t like nobody.” For Leonard, “the system” is first and foremost the criminal legal system, but his experience with a state and social apparatus of control, discrimination, and racial terror does not start and end during his involvement in the criminal legal system; instead, they are one element of a lifetime of living in the afterlife of slavery.
Leonard's underlying fear in prison of catching a CO's eye or provoking his ire is fused with the other forms of race-based trauma Leonard has experienced his entire life, such as being surveilled and almost abducted by the Klan. His carceral traumas are layered and interlocked with his ancestors' enslavement, his father's pseudo-enslavement in a chain gang, and his own attempted abduction and possible lynching. When trauma that occurs in prison is understood and discussed out of context of a person's life history of trauma, large elements of what constitutes trauma for a person can be missed. Prison is its own racial microclimate of racial violence and terror, but it is one that is a direct continuation of the microclimate of Birmingham, and in both of these microclimates, the legacy of slavery is not something of bygone days of the past but can, for the residents of these microclimates, feel very much alive and thriving in the present—those time periods are interlocked in their violence, terror, anger, and fear. This dense layering of interlocking racial terror and trauma can alter how incarcerated people perceive prison time.
Like Leonard, Luke was also routinely subjected to the racialized structural violence of prison, such as witnessing COs “put the wrong guys in the cell with dudes and they get raped or get killed,” which he said made him and his fellow Black prisoners need to be constantly vigilant, especially against “Aryan” guards whom he describes as untouchable in the system. Luke experiences structural traumas that are rooted in two inseparable lineages, the structural violence of the carceral system and the structural violence of anti-Black racism in the United States. Luke's constant exposure to trauma in prison over the years, from instances small and large, resulted in him experiencing periods of more intense trauma responses, such as anger, PTSD, and depression. Luke discusses how experiencing hypervigilance in prison “affected me routinely” and that routine violence like being “handcuffed and thrown outside shackled in the rain” and seeing someone get “tased in the groin deliberately” by a racist guard impacted him during and after prison: “I think about how it affects me, the stuff that I've seen. Those things are still here with me.” He discusses that the layers of routine violence were too mentally draining for him, and he stopped talking with people “when I know I should.” He calls this conditioning for violence a “heavy burden” that still affects him in reentry. For decades, Luke experienced “layers and layers and layers” of witnessing violence and being violent, coupled with other traumas, like loss and grief, that caused him for periods of time up to his release to feel that it was too much “to bear.” Leonard and Luke are representative of a part of my sample for which the entirety of their prison experience is overlaid with compounded structural trauma, in their case, of anti-Black racism. For others, like Tuan, only portions of their prison experience intersect with trauma-produced prison time.
Trauma-produced prison time
When Tuan entered prison, his temporal relationship to prison was fractured and constantly overridden with trauma responses to his compounded structural trauma and his crime. His compounded structural trauma of dispossession and his established maladaptive coping patterns follow Tuan into prison. His crime also left him feeling “numb” and not knowing “how to cope.” Tuan states that he coped in a maladaptive style “for more than ten years” by “just drinking and getting high and getting violent, right? Fighting, arguing […] Those were like all the negative coping skill I know how to cope with my situation when I was out in the community before, you know, up until I commit the crime. I carried that inside and that's how I was coping for a long time.”
In the first half of Tuan's sentence, his suppressed relationship to his pre-carceral trauma exposures, his crime, and his carceral trauma exposures dramatically shaped his relationship to time in prison. Tuan's cumulative trauma is a combination of the personal and structural. For 10 years, he attempted to use alcohol to exist outside of the reality of the present time and escape from the hauntings of his pre-carceral traumas, similar to what O’Donnell (2014) described as a reduction coping technique. Eventually, Tuan came to realize that the temporal dislocation was “not working” because after he sobered up, his negative emotions and the “the politics of being [in] prison” flooded back to the surface. For 10 years, Tuan was temporally captive in the cycles of emotional suppression and rumination/emotional dysregulation discussed in Walker's (2022) theory of hard-timing. Tuan eventually came to the realization that “I kept it inside […] I don’t show my emotion at all before and that was so unhealthy. That's why I allow my anger [to take over], it came from that, because [I] bury so much inside.” Tuan's trauma response of anger was rooted in his inability to recognize and incorporate his long legacy of past structural trauma into his present temporal reality. Tuan was in essence trying to escape from time—from the weight of it and the pain of it.
During a period of deep reflection, ignited by the death of his grandparents, Tuan was able to, for the first time, understand and process his compounded structural trauma and his trauma responses to it. He describes this transformative process: Reconnecting with my inner self and asking myself tough questions, like: Why, you know, like, why were you seeking so much approval from other people other than your family, you know? Why is that? How come I feel so unloved at home? How come I feel rejected? That's when I was able to connect the dots after so many years of destroying myself while I was in prison.
Half of Tuan's sentence was an experience of living in a trauma-produced past-dominated version of prison time. After Tuan was able to experience post-traumatic growth and healing in response to his legacy of traumas, his view of prison time also shifted to him actively living in the present. However, it was not an adjustment to the prison environment or a change in the prison environment (e.g. solitary confinement) that supported Tuan's post-traumatic growth, but strictly his own changed engagement with his past traumas. During this process, Tuan was able to narratively process his personal and structural trauma history and “make meaning” through narrativization (Herman, 1992). In this process, his structural traumas are recognized by himself and others (e.g. parole board, family, and other incarcerated people), acquiring cultural significance and capital in the process (Alexander, 2004).
Tuan's orientation to prison time was greatly shaped by his orientation to his traumas throughout the entirety of his sentence, and although Tuan did eventually experience post-traumatic growth, as discussed in O’Donnell (2014), this change occurred well past his initial period of adjustment to prison, when O’Donnell posited that the past would remain the most influential. In the subset of participants who experienced post-traumatic growth in prison, that growth typically occurred near or after the halfway point of their decades-long sentence (sample average = 27.8 years served). Incarcerated people's pre-prison pasts, which are often riddled with personal and structural traumas, are influential beyond the initial phrase of “tumult” (i.e., adjustment to the prison environment; O’Donnell, 2014) because nonlinear trauma responses do not easily map onto adjustment stages. For some, like Leonard and Luke, trauma-produced prison time overlays the whole of the carceral experience.
The compounded structural trauma Luke experienced before prison and the additional manifestations of that trauma lineage he gained during incarceration produced nonlinear trauma responses throughout his carceral and post-carceral life. Luke says his experience with trauma responses are not fixed and predictable, but instead, he says it is like “scattered showers, sometimes it, you know, you run by and go boo and do all the stuff and [it] don't even phase me. Other times it catches me, and I react, […] and just being incarcerated like I say for 33 years. A lot of people don’t understand it.” His relationship to time has been enduringly altered through his compounded structural trauma exposure and symptoms.
Luke describes prison as “like a real war” and says, “mentally I still going through stuff.” At Luke's current job, a man ran through the floor one day saying, “watch it, watch it, watch it,” but Luke thought the man was saying “get down, get down, get down,” and he reacted like he was in prison about to be harmed or killed. Luke says, “I was like, man, this is flash back.” I conducted multiple interviews with Luke. In an interview conducted 6 months after his release from prison, the idea of PTSD post-prison resurfaces throughout. Luke is very concerned with experiencing temporal ruptures that he cannot control—of being transported back to the violence and fear of prison against his conscious will. He wants to make clear in the interview that he is not “crazy” but that he is genuinely concerned with how these ruptures will affect his well-being and success in reentry.
Depression, anger, and feelings of it all being “too much to bear” came in waves for Luke in prison as the carceral traumas stacked up layer upon layer, adding to his racism-based compounded structural trauma. He attempted to cope with his intrusive trauma responses in many ways, such as occupying his mind with prison gang “politics” to avoid painful memories and emotions. 9 However, none of his attempted coping techniques succeed in stopping the intrusive trauma responses. Luke experienced cycles of anger, pain, and violence throughout the totality of his sentence. His emotional and mental journey through his prison sentence is not linear, but one of starts and stops, with sometimes giant ruptures in his emotional and temporal relationship to him doing “his time.” His mental headspace was sometimes in the cyclical present of prison and sometimes deeply engulfed in the traumas of his recent and distant past. Unlike Tuan, Luke never escaped the cycle of “hard-timing” in prison and lives in an enduring carceral temporality (McNeill et al., 2022; Walker, 2022). Luke experiences the “afterlife” of prison as a further compounding with his anti-Black compounded structural trauma (Miller, 2021). Luke is representative of a portion of my participants who do not temporally “adjust” to prison and reentry environments and are likely to struggle with their personal and structural traumas remaining “unresolved” and “unintegrated” as personal and cultural narratives (Alexander, 2004).
Trauma responses are often not contained in time to the immediate aftermath of the event and can, in the cases of structural traumas, span generations. Trauma responses defy teleological time, uprooting the notion of continuous advancement, whether as a society or as an individual. Luke still experiences prison as if it was real after he left prison, and while in prison, grief and pain haunt him, continuously pulling him away from standard prison time into long bouts of rumination and emotional dysregulation (i.e., trauma-produced prison time). In contrast to Tuan and participants in my study who experience post-traumatic growth in prison, Luke is representative of an alternative subset of participants for whom the totality of their prison sentence and reentry period is beset by continued trauma responses due to the nonlinearity of their personal and structural traumas, which in turn significantly affects their overall well-being. This is a subset of my population that, in meaningful ways, do not temporally adjust to prison or reentry because they are temporally engulfed in other trauma-produced temporal microclimates. Within this subset, multiple of my participants experienced passive and active suicidal ideation in the reentry process, in which past traumas and prolonged trauma responses were presented as key components of their pathology.
The influence of trauma on prison time
While the existing literature on prison time theorizes that people's pre-prison past will slowly recede as people exist increasingly in the cyclical present (e.g. Carceral and Flaherty, 2021; Marti, 2017; O’Donnell, 2014), my exploration of compounded structural trauma and trauma responses reveals that there is another common form of prison time—one that is highly permeated with the past. Prison time is, in fact, the interplay of two nonlinear versions of time, the previously identified “standard prison time” of the cyclical present and “trauma-produced prison time.” The nonlinear time of prison, where future orientation is heavily diminished, creates an orientation not just to the present but also to the past, whether consciously or unconsciously. In prison, people might be able to suppress the past for stretches of time with drug and alcohol use or by throwing themselves into the business of gang culture, but in prison, most people, especially long-termers, will face periods when they are alone with just themselves and their thoughts. This paper argues that the dominance of “standard prison time” within the prison time literature reinforces Goffman’s (1961) idea of prison as an isolated and exceptional place—divorcing incarcerated people's experiences from long personal and communal legacies of trauma.
In trauma-produced prison time, the past merges with the present through trauma to create a new amalgamation of past and present that can manifest as the past juxtaposed into the present or a melding of the past and present into a new temporal sphere. When a person experiences an event that triggers trauma responses, it might appear as if the emotions of the past are juxtaposed onto the present. For those with long legacies of systemic oppression, the microclimate of prison might be a temporal melding of the past and present—a place where chattel slavery, convict leasing, and mass incarceration merge not just in theory but also in a lived experience of this legacy. Like Walker's (2022) theory of hard-timing, people might be overwhelmed by intrusive rumination, absorbed into the mistakes and traumas of the past, and at other times, it might be through an unconscious or barely conscious—a not fully articulated—layering of temporal realities. Emotions, trauma responses, and behavioral patterns might let people know that the past is still very much alive and, in the moment, in control of their reality. Tuan attempts to escape the feeling of being unloved and rejected in his refugee past through drinking and prison gang violence; Luke tries to process the heavy burden of the “layers and layers and layers” of pre-carceral and carceral violence that appear in trauma responses like “scattered showers” throughout his life; and Leonard sees his own, his family's, and his people's long legacy of traumas at the hand of the White supremacists come to life again in acts like White guards giving incarcerated people knives to attack Black prisoners.
These case studies are an opening to better understand how the past might not stay “the past” for incarcerated people. Overall, the theory of trauma-produced prison time supports the “combined model” within prison scholarship by demonstrating multiple mechanisms for past personal and collective traumas to be imported into the prison and interact with the prison environment (e.g. Crewe, 2007; Dye, 2010). However, this paper also brings into question if “importation” as a concept within the combined model is the best framework when the permeability of the prison is considered. Instead of the outside being imported, it could be more productive to view this process as an ongoing, dyadic process of exchange and layering—revealing the permeability of the whole temporal prison experience. Future lines of scholarship could examine how to further integrate the combined model and carceral permeability literatures.
In carceral spaces, trauma-produced prison time connects to the larger temporalities of outside “free” society and the circular present of prison to function as a world within a world inhabited by people who have experienced structural and personal trauma. Instead of progressing through temporal stages of adjustment or transitioning from one temporal space to exclusively join another, incarcerated people routinely transverse the embedded temporal realities of society time (i.e. free-world teleological time), standard prison time (i.e. the circular present), and a trauma-produced prison time. For some, their foray into a trauma-produced prison time might last hours or weeks at a time as they experience trauma-produced “hard-timing.” Building upon theories of carceral permeability, people might slide in and out of standard prison time and trauma-produced prison time for large portions or the whole length of their sentence. For others, the entirety of their carceral experience is overlaid with compounded structural trauma and trauma-produced in-group conceptions of time. For them, the carceral experience is embedded within and deeply interconnected with their larger compounded structural trauma. The boundaries between the three temporal orientations are permeable and can, for some, completely overlap, supporting a nonlinear view of carceral temporality that strays from approaches to prison time that focus on progress or stages.
Conclusion
This paper uses three cases studies, selected from a larger pool of participants who experienced compounded structural trauma (66% of sample), to integrate multigenerational identity into analyses of how compounded structural trauma and personal trauma significantly influence experiences of time inside carceral institutions. Trauma responses cannot be understood without a nonlinear understanding of time, and neither can the lived experience of incarcerated people be understood without a better understanding of the nonlinearity of trauma. Significantly, the nonlinearity of trauma-produced prison time strongly supports an argument for the past routinely influencing the carceral experience well beyond the initial entry shocks of early confinement, because past personal traumas and structural traumas can “haunt” people well into the middle stretches of their sentence, be embedded in the totality of the prison experience, and be part of a lineage of trauma-produced time that precedes prison and follows into reentry.
Carlton and Segrave (2011) argued that studies of incarceration can silo the experience of prison “pains” within the carceral experience and often lack a broader conceptualization of trauma exposure that considers how structural disadvantages and institutional harm inflict trauma across the life course. Carceral geography scholars argue for the prison to be understood as a permeable environment for which continuities and connections exist between the outside community and the prison (e.g. Aviram, 2024; Moran, 2018). This paper enriches the theory of carceral permeability by showing how social and structural traumas function as a psychological and temporal aspect of the prison's greater continuity with larger society. Through the concepts of “compounded structural trauma” and “trauma-produced prison time,” this paper presents a new avenue for how the carceral environment is temporally permeable and makes the argument that incarcerated people who regularly experience this trauma-produced temporal permeability experience a version of prison time not adherent to the expected stages of prison adjustment.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Keramet Reiter, Mona Lynch, and Christopher Seeds for their comments on drafts on this paper. I would also like to thank Alyson K. Zalta for their mentorship.
Ethical approval and informed consent statements
The ethnography portion of this study was approved by the university's institutional review board (IRB) office (HS# 2019-5114) on 22 January 2020. The oral history portion of this study is exempt under the university's IRB office. All oral history subjects signed written consent forms, and all ethnography subjects provided informed oral consent.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation Fellowship administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and an American Association of University Women (AAUW) American Dissertation Fellowship.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
Ethnography data are not available. Oral histories are housed in a public archive: liferrecords.com.
Correction (April 2026):
Article has been updated to correct the years cited in the in-text references.