time & incarceration

Prison time is the obvious form of punishment in our world. 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 indubitable 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, 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 often question relative values on the two sides of the equation, we seldom doubt the viability of the calculus itself.

- Michael Hardt - "Prison time," Yale French Studies Vol. 91, 1997, pg 64-65