Temporicide: Waiting,punishment,and (social) death

Abstract

Waiting is an individual and collective social process embedded in everyday life. State-sanctioned waiting is a widespread form of political subordination enacted by the state through bureaucratic processes—criminal legal systems being a prime example. We draw connections between waiting and punishment to explore the systemic power structures that regulate social interactions based on processes of stratification. Here, we explore formal and informal waiting under processes of state detention through our exemplars in Canada, Jamaica, and the United States. We explore a certain kind of indefinite waiting we call “temporicide,” a condition in which the future is circumscribed by a present condition for an unspecified length of time. Temporicide is where living social death and necropolitics meet. We argue that waiting serves as a marker and maker of difference, and with that, certain groups are subject to wait by the state for longer periods and sometimes until death.

Keywords

Waiting temporicide punishment race social death necropolitics

Introduction

Of the qualities that characterize the criminal legal system in most places around the world, one of the most common and salient is that people are forced to wait. Waiting is a banal, everyday aspect of most criminal legal practices, institutions, and processes—and is arguably one of the more soul-crushing. People wait for court dates; they wait in court for their case to be called; they wait for the judge; they wait for the jury; they wait in holding tanks; they wait in jail and in the penitentiary (Flaherty and Carceral, 2021; Kohn, 2017; Laursen et. al., 2020). Not only are the accused forced to wait—relatives, friends, loved ones, and other community members wait along with them or for them (Comfort, 2008; Gonzalez Van Cleve, 2016; Kotova, 2017). Thus, the criminal legal system inflicts a kind of punishment on other people as well. Family members wait for visits in waiting rooms at jails, prisons, and other detention facilities, often for hours. Most of all, they wait for their loved ones to come home. Some of the waiting is intended as punishment and formalized in the law—what is a prison sentence if not a sentence to wait? —but much of it acts as unsanctioned or informal punishment (Armstrong, 2018; Feeley, 1979; Meisenhelder, 1985).

Waiting¹ in the criminal legal system is just one example of state-organized waiting. For our purposes, we consider state-sanctioned or state-organized waiting as a widespread form of political subordination enacted by the state through bureaucratic processes (Auyero, 2012; Eife and Kirk, 2021; Fleming, 2021). This includes arbitrary wait times for social welfare programs, wait times at the border, and other slow-working bureaucratic systems. Embedded in processes of domination, waiting is thus a way of experiencing power (Adam, 1990; Bourdieu, 2000; Foucault 1995). It operates by ranking the value of an individual's time relative to their perceived social and economic worth to society, thereby extending processes of exploitation and control (Bhavnani and Davis, 2000). It indexes a set of unfolding relationships; who is waiting on whom, for example, is an expression of the power structures within a social system (Adam, 1990; Auyero, 2012; Hage, 2009; Schwartz, 1974).

Waiting does not affect everyone in the same way. For socially dominated groups, waiting is a common experience that produces ‘subjective effects of dependency and subordination’ (Auyero, 2012). Some state-induced waiting is situational, temporary, and circumstantial, but some types are more enduring and can even come to constitute a person's life—a life on hold, spent waiting (Dwyer, 2009). Waiting in some communities and groups is endemic and may even come to characterize membership in that group.² Migrants, the working class, and people with less power tend to wait more often and longer for government services (Auyero, 2012; Conlon, 2011; Jacobsen et al., 2021). There are qualitative differences in waiting under different forms of state-imposed confinement—asylums, immigrant detention, juvenile detention facilities, jails, prisons, and other institutions and practices.

In this article, we identify a certain logic of structural domination that results in temporicide—temporal indeterminacy, a condition in which the future is circumscribed by a present condition that will continue for an unspecified length of time.³ Temporicide counters conventional linear understandings of time, dominant under racialized capitalism. Because it is indeterminate, temporicide differs from the temporal logic of the conventional determinate prison sentence; life without parole and similar “life-trashing” sentences spanning the majority of one's life are examples of sentences that amount to temporicide (Seeds, 2022; Simon, 2001). Temporicide is where living social death and necropolitics meet. It reveals the necropolitical structure of the carceral system where the right “to kill or to let live” (Mbembe, 2019: 66) coalesces with the right to let die. This can be seen as a form of social death as incarcerated individuals are subjected to marginalization and dehumanization and, in some instances, subjected to conditions that lead to a slow death (Patterson, 1982).

Temporicide is a contemporary manifestation of the coloniality of time—the persistence of colonial forms of power long past the period in which formal colonialism has ended (Kolia, 2023). The colonial legacy is in the practice. And though there is a link between what we call endemic waiting—waiting that spans generations and affects a group of people—and temporicide, not all endemic waiting is temporicide. Only in the most extreme cases are entire groups put into a zone of prolonged temporal death. As the following cases exemplify, however, Black people and other groups subject to endemic waiting are prime candidates for temporicide. Put differently, Black people and other marginalized groups are disproportionately subject to, and in many cases targeted for, the kind of infernal, eternal punishment, whether formal or implicit, that temporicide amounts to. Although in this article we confine our analysis to temporicide in various carceral spaces and experiences, the concept of temporicide extends beyond that of confinement. From slavery in the Antebellum South to human-induced famine in South Sudan and the internal displacement, starvation, and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, temporicide relegates racialized, gendered, and othered persons to conditions of a prolonged death.

We explore institutionalized waiting in relation to capitalist time and corresponding notions of liberty, critically examining how these frameworks intersect with issues of coloniality and slavery. First, we give some context for our exemplars and supply a justification for their inclusion. We then delve into the pedagogical and functional dimensions of waiting, connecting broader conceptualizations of waiting to its specific manifestations within the criminal legal systems in three contexts, specifically highlighting the link between waiting and punishment. Following this, we focus our discussion on the notion of “temporicide,” providing an in-depth analysis of our chosen exemplars. Our aim is to shed light on how systemic delays, prolonged periods of waiting, and life-trashing sentences within the criminal legal system serve as forms of temporal violence that disproportionately affect marginalized and racialized bodies. Our exemplars demonstrate that these delays are not merely the result of bureaucratic inefficiencies but are deeply embedded in the socio-political dynamics of a society.

Our exemplars

We see a structural continuity in the three exemplars⁴ we study—Cyntoia Brown-Long, sentenced to life (51 years) in a Tennessee prison in the United States (although she was granted clemency after 15 years); Noel Chambers, who was incarcerated at the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre in Kingston, Jamaica from February 1980 until he died in 2020 (40 years later) without ever facing a trial or being sentenced; and Kashif Ali, who was held over 7 years as an irregular migrant in a detention facility in Ontario, Canada. Despite the obvious differences—one is in the United States, another in Jamaica, and one in Canada; one sentenced after what is conventionally termed “due process,” the second left to languish “at the Governor General's Pleasure,” and the third held precisely because his identity and nationality were unclear—taken together the cases tell us something important about waiting, difference-making, and the nature of punishment. For Cyntoia Brown-Long, the life sentence was the punishment, but in the other two examples, temporicide is, or can be considered, an informal punishment because the treatment was not legally sanctioned as punishment sensu stricto. Being forced to wait, potentially forever (or until death), acts as punishment, even if it can be officially denied as punishment.

Were they guilty? Examining their cases, we found that these cases were suffused with factual and moral ambiguity. In two of the three cases, the motives for the original actions—whether they were criminal and not self-defense or the result of insanity—could not be conclusively established and were the bone of much contention. In a third case, a criminal conviction had only an attenuated and indirect relationship to the legal limbo of indefinite migrant detention, which was not, in any case, punishment for the original crime. Yet in all three cases, the instant offense was just the beginning of a chain of ambiguities: the subsequent actions by the police, prosecutors, judges, and the procedures themselves that led to their prolonged imprisonment were also more nebulous than we would have thought. The motives of these legal agents were even harder to parse. The paper trail could tell us only so much.

Indeed, it was the length of the imprisonment, as well as the moral ambiguity that pervaded each step in the legal process, which led to the notoriety in all three cases. They garnered national and international attention because they seemed so extreme. Insofar as these exemplars are extreme, they throw into relief certain aspects of the conjunction between temporicide and injustice that are ubiquitous, albeit in less-outstanding forms. Other, less-lengthy practices of temporicide may seem less notable, but they are also unjust, even if they are smaller in degree, do not garner public attention, are less morally ambiguous, or do not have the whiff of public scandal. Therefore, for our purposes, we lay aside the question of whether the people in these three cases were guilty in order to clarify the concept and practice of “temporicide.” We focus, in other words, on racialized experiences of waiting in carceral spaces rather than on the person's guilt or innocence. These stories could break through the banal—that is, they were capable of disrupting the social inertia of public indifference, defamiliarizing widespread institutional practices of dehumanization, and garnering public outcry for change.

This article utilizes interviews, semi-structured interviews, news articles, court documents, and other resources as the basis for analysis. Data on each exemplar was dependent on local media sources, and we prioritized sources that captured their subjective experiences based on what was available, including profiles and interviews with the Toronto Star and Jamaica Gleaner. All of the data utilized is publicly available, with the exception of the semi-structured interviews that Gabreélla (Ella) Friday conducted with Cyntoia Brown-Long in New York in 2020. These interviews served as the basis for our analysis of Brown-Long, which we supplement with contemporaneous newspaper coverage of her trial, her own memoir, and the documentary Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story (2011). In the case of Noel Chambers in Jamaica, we rely on case documents, parliamentary statements (Chang, 2020), human rights reports, government accountability studies [Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), 2020], news accounts (Clarke, 2020), and published autopsies. Although we do not have Chambers’ own perspective, we do have those of his sister and niece (Jamaica Gleaner, 2020). For Ali in Canada, we rely on published media accounts (e.g., Jackson, 2017; Kennedy, 2017), court decisions on writs of habeas corpus, and video interviews with him and his family members. As a result, we focus on Brown-Long's own analysis, whereas in Chamber's and Ali's cases, we center on relevant federal legislation and legal procedures alongside the few subject perspectives available.

Time, colonization, and racial capitalism

The experiences we examine exemplify racialized, gendered, and intergenerational systems of waiting, social control, and punishment tied to the legacies of racial capitalism, colonization, and slavery. Racialized waiting, in our analysis, began with the slave trade: the hold of slave ships was a place where people were forced to wait, as Fleming (2021) has put it. This particular form of racialized waiting was peculiarly and unimaginably onerous. The violence of the Middle Passage, the degradation, the helplessness, the sexual violence, and the high rates of mortality are only some of the more prominent aspects of the social death undergone by those shoved through the Door-of-No-Return. Racialized waiting in the Middle Passage and, subsequently, during slavery was punishment without crime. They were forms of violence that impressed on people that they were subordinate beings: violence for its own sake marked social hierarchy and the power that the enslaver had over the enslaved. The violence of enslavement was a way of marking to or teaching the newly enslaved that they were socially dead beings—they had only a temporary reprieve of a death sentence, as Orlando Patterson has put it: “Slavery was not a pardon; it was, peculiarly, a conditional commutation” (Patterson, 1982: 5). This condition could be characterized as bringing together necropolitics (the power over life and death) with the temporary, contingent deferral of physical death, that is, social death.

In the emergent racist logic, the enforced incapacitation for weeks in the living entombment of the cargo ship was then refashioned into other kinds of waiting that extended into months, then years, then in perpetuity, and then intergenerationally for those consigned to enslavement and their descendants.

From enslaved people who were forced to wait in the hold of the slave ship to those who were forced to wait on the auction block, from those who were forced to wait for emancipation to those who were inundated by calls to “go slow” in the Civil Rights Movement, waiting has routinely been weaponized as a technology of anti-black violence and civic exclusion, one designed to contain the movements of black people throughout the precincts of global modernity.⁵ (Fleming, 2021: 1)

Fleming sees racialized waiting as a persistent element of anti-Black violence, even as the technologies of enforced waiting have been modified by the state over time as those technologies have been contested by social movements. Racialized waiting as an institution has thus been preserved through transformation, to borrow a phrase Reva Siegel has used in a different context (Siegel 1996). From the standpoint of the enslaved and their descendants, racialized waiting was an endless deferral of the prospect of freedom, a concept central to the Black freedom struggle in the Americas. We identify this temporal zero zone at the nexus of necropolitics and social death as the originary point of temporicide.

This theorization of racialized time challenges the conventional historical narrative of the growth of capitalism, which often overlooks how time has been racialized and weaponized as a tool of control and exclusion, shaping a different and more oppressive transformation of temporal experience (Mahadeo, 2024; Sojoyner, 2017). According to a dominant Eurocentric account of the growth of capitalism, European hegemonic time became linear, internally homogeneous, quantifiable, segmented, and fungible. Time became a critical commodity. This is crucial for the logic of the contract: the emergent proletariat could sell their time in the form of labor for money. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others in the 17th and 18th centuries (and after) provided an ideological rationale for modern liberalism as they elaborated ideas of individual liberty and natural rights to ground their theories of the social contract. The groundwork laid by contract theorists for the concepts of life and liberty, combined with the homogenization and divisibility of time into uniform units, paved the way—as an ironic parallel and as liberty's nether side—to the jurisprudence of the prison sentence, which emerged gradually in Germany and the Netherlands throughout this same period.

The prison sentence, as it emerged in Europe, is predicated on temporarily suspending or deferring a person's personal freedom, which is otherwise seen as a basic natural right. As Davis (2003) pointed out, the prison sentence thus presupposes the idea of individual liberty for its deprivation to make sense as punishment, just as the concept of the prison sentence relies on the mathematics of linear time:

The computability of state punishment in terms of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primary form of punishment. (Davis, 2003: 44)

Selling one's time as wage labor and losing one's time in the form of punishment became two sides of the coin of western modernity.

This narrative of liberty, wage labor, and incarceration is not untrue; it is only partial, though, and does not capture the striated nature of capitalism's many temporalities. Beyond the multifaceted aspects of endemic waiting and their role in the history of Black people of the diaspora, other groups’ relationship to time also changed drastically with the global expansion of capitalism (Adam, 1990; Thompson, 1967). The imposition of the private sphere for women, indentured servitude, and other practices and social distinctions engendered ruptures of time (and fragmenting of the body as well). Time and how it was measured or marked is what differentiated the various degrees of freedom, and as a corollary, the way people waited and struggled for those freedoms. The experiences of time under colonialism, as Adib and Emiljanowicz (2019: 1221) put it, are thus “fractured, uneven, and co-constituted by tension.” Temporalities splinter and differentiate through colonial violence. Time under racial capitalism was thus always experienced differentially and unevenly by different groups.

Thus, although capitalism imposed the modern tyranny of the clock, alternative temporal orderings continue to exist, unvanquished by more than five centuries of colonialism (Adib and Emiljanowicz, 2019; Kolia, 2023). Pickering (2004), Mills (2014), Hunfeld (2022) and others critique the Eurocentric narratives that take the capitalist prescriptions for the hegemony of the clock too much on their own terms, confusing an imperial aspiration for a description, thus failing to recognize other temporalities (also see Kolia, 2023).

We start with racialized waiting to pivot the center of the conventional logic: if wage labor was marked by the clock and the prison sentence by a deprivation of liberty for a set amount of time, this was not the way work and punishment were measured or experienced by the enslaved on the plantations in Jamaica, South Carolina or Pernambuco (Paton 2004). By this we mean there is not a strict dichotomy between the temporalities of slavery, labor, and the penitentiary; rather, their interrelationship is complex, multiplicitous, and changes over time. Colonial modernity thus brings into the present a series of contradictions: individual liberty, human rights, and the rule of law, along with dehumanization, the commodification of time, contract labor, and the tyranny of the clock along with forced labor. Just as time multiplied, particular penal institutions nested within a range of other social practices and institutions (workhouses, almshouses, galley slavery, indentured servitude, the enclosure movement, U.S. Indian boarding and Canadian residential schools, lunatic asylums, and so on).

Although the colonial period has ended in formal terms, as we suggest above, enduring patterns of power have continued to constitute social relationships far beyond the sphere of work and economics (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Temporicide is an example of the coloniality of time, an illustration of the kind of horror produced through a long-standing pattern of power inherited from a period of perpetual slavery and racialized servitude. For temporicide, the usual relationship between individual liberty and freedom has changed. If, in the modern penitentiary, that relationship is suspended for a measurable interval, in temporicide, it is annihilated.

The how is the why: a pedagogy of temporicide

But what is the rationale for temporicide, given the dominant capitalist logic? Although wage labor has obvious functional value for the capitalist, the purpose of making people wait, especially waiting indefinitely, is a bit more obscure. It would be a methodological error to presuppose that waiting must serve some function. Indeed, it may. The value, however, may be only indirectly financial. In considering the function of making people wait, we have also speculated that the purpose is symbolic: a ritual to signify something about the social order, a way to tell a story about the values of a particular society. Alternatively, it may simply be a byproduct—collateral damage, so to speak, of a certain bureaucratic order.

Several contemporary commentators have argued that certain aspects of modern, state-imposed waiting serve the needs of capitalism. As the title of their book suggests, Canning and Bhatia's Stealing Time: Migration, Temporalities and State Violence is predicated on the idea that nation-states make migrants, disproportionately people racialized as non-white and from the Global South, wait (whether at borders, in detention, for legal documents, or for a change in legal status) as a way to steal their earning power from them. “The time people have spent to accumulate social and cultural capital is thwarted by deportation. This is the stealing of time” (Canning and Bhatia, 2021: xix; also see Khosravi, 2021: 204).

We do not wish to gainsay attempts to explain racialized waiting as a way for the state to steal labor time. However, we do think that these explanations are insufficient. They do not seem to account for the magnitude and pervasiveness of dead waiting time. To supplement this functional explanation, we offer that state-orchestrated waiting acts as a way of training people into subordination—it is a social practice to produce docility, abjection, and conformity, although it can also be used to excite tension and frustration in those who are forced to wait. The state teaches poor people a lesson that their time—that their lives—are not important (Auyero, 2012). Insofar as the burden of waiting is born unequally by different groups, waiting involves an implicit pedagogy about the nature of the state, class, race, and gender. In this, as in so many other spheres of life, the disparate effects of racial inequality and poverty are hidden in plain view: official policies of non-discrimination and formal equality disguise substantive inequality, and formalist prescriptions on the nature of punishment and justice overlook substantive injustice.

Although usually implicit, the pedagogy may also be explicit when a corrections officer consciously “teaches” someone “a lesson” —by making them wait. For instance, one of our co-authors, Josh Price, while involved in advocacy for people in a county jail, encountered a whistle-blower—a corrections officer who reported colleagues for abuse—who later faced a series of petty humiliations at work. He told Josh that once, he was forced to wait between two sets of sliding doors (“sliders” or sally ports) for 45 minutes by other correction officers. They made him wait as a kind of punishment and form of humiliation. They were teaching him not to file reports on fellow officers. Similarly, a woman we interviewed complained to jail authorities about not receiving her HIV cocktail. Corrections officers handcuffed her to a chair and left her for several hours. They were teaching her not to complain. These are situational, informal, contingent, temporary, and unsanctioned forms of punishment.

Waiting in these instances can become a condition of one's life and characteristic of group experience. Auyero (2012) and Lara-Millán (2014, 2021) showed how poorer populations are forced to wait at the mercy of the state because of their limited social capital. One of the outstanding characteristics of contemporary migrants the world over is how often they are forced to wait (Turnbull, 2016; Zharkevich, 2021). Indigenous people in what is now Canada are forced to wait for generations for clean running water, for equal treatment, and for getting their land back. This waiting reinforces their marginalization. There are also gendered aspects of waiting. Canning (2017) shows how, for migrant women who are survivors of violence, the everyday threat of detention and deportation, poor housing, and inadequate welfare access, and systemic cuts to domestic and sexual violence support all contribute to a temporal limbo that limits their autonomy. In the criminal legal system, gendered aspects of waiting are most evident, perhaps, in the snail-paced delivery of health services for incarcerated women and transgender people or in the excruciating separations that incarcerated mothers have to endure between visits with their children. Rosenberg (2017) shows how trans and gender nonconforming persons wait for gender-affirming care, often denied inside, forcing “several gendered pasts into a body's present and places these temporalities in conversation with varying futures as the body's potential” (Rosenberg, 2017: 91). Cultural responses to waiting sometimes seem to almost become characteristics of a group. In this way, the collective experience of waiting not only reflects the imposed conditions, but also transforms into a powerful cultural practice, embodying the persistence and adaptability necessary to survive and challenge systemic inequities (Anzaldúa, 1987; Fleming, 2021).

Finally, framing enforced waiting as informal or extrajudicial punishment highlights a number of aspects of the criminal legal system. It reveals unbridled sovereign authority, as well as dispersed circuits of power and responsibility. Informal waiting, as well as wait time imposed disproportionately on a particular group, is produced by bureaucratic indifference to people's time and sometimes intentional cruelty. Focusing on waiting also shows that the presumption of innocence is sometimes confused with the presumption of guilt, thereby blurring the boundaries of punishment and non-punishment. As we suggested at the outset, the social subject forced to wait is not just the individual who comes into conflict with the law, but engulfs a social network of family, friends, and community members also forced to wait. Analysis of the connections between waiting and punishment (whether formal or informal) reveals the systemic power structures that regulate social interactions based on and buttressing processes of stratification.

Temporicide: the death of time

Our analysis suggests a corollary to Ruth Willson Gilmore's definition of racism, “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” (Gilmore, 2007: 28). We extend her argument to include state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to prolonged death. Temporicide marks the point at which endemic waiting leads to the death of time. Individuals or groups find themselves stuck in a perpetual now where future possibilities are truncated—to wait indefinitely and infinitely long. Subjectively, it is a normalized aspect of life that is experienced as brutality. A punitive aspect of the process is not being aware of how long the wait is (Schwartz, 1974). The pedagogy of temporicide is that for others—or at least those with some power over you and your time—not only is your life worthless, but your suffering is either meaningless or desirable.

Many dimensions of social death in the form of racialized chattel slavery in the Americas are linked to reproduction, such that the genealogy of temporicide is a gendered condition, even when the person who experiences temporicide is a cisgender male. In his study of slavery, Patterson (1982) uses the oxymoron “genealogical isolate” to refer to the enslaved person: the person who lives in a community (such as a community of slaves or prisoner–captives) where each lives a condition of abandonment, a social and legal isolation of one person from another that can nevertheless be reproduced over time. This feature of slavery is an aspect of temporicide: an experience of a group intergenerationally that, paradoxically, each person experiences profoundly alone. So, temporicide is experienced as natal alienation, to use Patterson's term (1982). It is also an experience of structural violence, a condition in which one's life possibilities are diminished. It is an aspect of the afterlife of slavery. In a world governed by time's arrow—a vector of time moving into the future, where time is divisible into uniform units, temporicide expands the present into a universe that threatens to engulf the future in a nightmarish no-exit.

Temporicide captures a temporal phenomenon that has both subjective and objective features that we explore in the following sections. Multiple and intersecting identities emerge as important in the analysis of temporicide. Our exemplars—Cyntoia as a Black girl in the foster system; Noel as a Black Rastafarian deemed to be mentally “unfit” for trial; and Kashif as an undocumented African migrant—were placed into structures of vulnerability. They were all marginalized by their intersecting differences, which in turn placed them at greater risk of waiting, interactions with the carceral actors, and, eventually, temporicide.

Cyntoia Brown-Long: a life-trashing sentence and a daydream deferred

A lot has been written on the nature of life sentences (Bennet, 2021; Cohen and Taylor, 1973; Seeds, 2022; Simon, 2001). For our purposes, we would like to focus on the extremely long stretch of time. At the age of 16, Cyntoia Brown-Long was sentenced to 51 years. Portrayed as an anachronistic jezebel,⁶ Brown was trafficked as a minor and forced into prostitution. Her offense was killing a “john” at the age of 14. Her sentence was in effect a life-trashing sentence, “undisguisedly aimed at causing pain and despair in their targets” (Simon, 2001: 128–129). In many ways life and life-trashing sentences function as a prolonged death sentence.

Following the verdict, Brown-Long recalls, “I didn't have to wait for the judge to read the sentence. I already knew. Everyone did. First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence in the state of Tennessee. I was still just a teenager. I’d never had a driver's license, never been to prom, never voted,” (Brown-Long, 2019: xvii). Her childhood was interrupted by trafficking and ended with a life-trashing sentence. Had she not been granted clemency, she would have been 67 years old at the time of her release. This would have prevented her from accruing wealth and making life connections. This sentence would have effectively sterilized her, as she would have been incarcerated during her childbearing years—a colonial legacy of dictating the reproductive and parenting capacity of Black girls and women. This would have forced her to enter the workforce at an age three years past the average retirement in the United States. And, with Black women's life expectancy of 77 years in the United States, her prospects of a long life after prison would have been abysmal. Although Brown-Long received a definite sentence—while in our other cases, the detention is defined by uncertainty and indeterminacy—we argue she was still subject to temporicide because her time—her life—was effectively ended before it could begin.

Yet waiting is rarely done passively (Auyero, 2012; Hage, 2009; Turnbull, 2016). Where does one's mind, specifically the imagination, go when presented with seemingly endless amounts of time? For some, their mentalscape serves as a view into another reality—an imagined escape from the physical confinement in which they are able to create a different reality. Ella Friday interviewed Cyntoia Brown-Long, who described “daydreaming”’ as a way to temporarily escape sitting in the cell:

Cyntoia Brown-Long: Now I’ll tell you, when I was going through being in solitary confinement a lot. Whenever I was in the cell, like, to pass time cause you don’t normally get out and do a lot of stuff. You just, your time is just revolving around mealtime. Um, I spent a lot of time daydreaming. So, you’ll just want to lay around and just dream. And so like, I can start out, like, in one place where, I don’t know, I am going to school for something. And then next week I’ve won an award for something that I’ve done or I’m graduating or something like that. So, you just keep this long running imagination that you have. So that is something I passed the time with when I was you know…

Ella Friday: So, you’d just imagine a whole different world?

Cyntoia Brown-Long: Not even a whole different world. Just something like that you’d imagine yourself doing, other than just sitting in that cell. And it's just like, I don’t know, it comforts you.

Brown-Long seemed to be imagining different possibilities for her life outside her cell to actively pass the exorbitant waiting associated with a life-trashing sentence. She was daydreaming of a life denied—possible futures in which her life was not interrupted and eradicated. By changing her mental location, she was able to effectively circumvent the waiting and isolation. Not only did this help her cope with the reality of imprisonment, but it also acted as a form of intrapersonal (self-affirming) resistance. She resisted the confinement of the prison while also actively escaping it—even if it was only temporarily and symbolically.

Finally, in some ways, life was able to continue for Brown-Long, as she met and married her husband after 13 years of imprisonment in a Tennessee prison. He wrote to her in 2017 after viewing the documentary Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story (2011), and several celebrities publicized her case. Soon after, a relationship ensued—he helped her to believe she would soon be free and persuaded her to seek clemency from the Governor of Tennessee, though fewer than one percent of applicants were successful. In 2019, due to a marriage by proxy law in Texas, where her husband lived, they filed for a marriage license and were married over the phone (Brown-Long, 2019). A few months following the wedding, Brown-Long was released from prison at the age of 31 after being granted clemency. Still, this was only possible because of the public nature and media attention surrounding her case, which is rarely afforded to incarcerated women, especially Black (darker-skinned) women. Most women sentenced to life do not find their future in prison or receive enough public outcry to obtain their freedom. Now free, Cyntoia Brown-Long actually has the prospect to live out her daydreams and make them a reality.

Noel Chambers: waiting to death at Her Majesty's Pleasure

Noel Chambers, his life, and the circumstances of his long detention received public outcry, but only after it was too late. Chambers died in one of Jamaica's maximum-security correctional facilities after being imprisoned for 40 years without ever being tried for a crime. Charged initially with murder, he was deemed “unfit to plead” and therefore held “at the Governor General's Pleasure” (formerly at Her Majesty's Pleasure) and at the “Court's pleasure” under the Criminal Justice Administrative Act (1960). Jamaica's legal system continues to imprison indefinitely mentally ill persons who are deemed “unable to plead” even though this is only one option permissible under the law. The court has four main options: (a) remand the person in custody “at the Court's pleasure”; (b) order that the person be committed to a psychiatric facility; (c) order supervision and treatment; or (d) order guardianship (Criminal Justice Administration Act, 1960, § 25(C)(2)). A major question raised after his death that came to the public's attention is whether he was indeed unfit to plead. In a report by INDECOM in Jamaica, the Commissioner of Corrections documents showed that Chambers was tried and convicted of murder in the Home Circuit Court. The guilty verdict was somehow “struck out and replaced with unfit to plead” (INDECOM, 2020: 5). Who “struck out” a decision made by the court, and under what constitutional authority?

The Minister of National Security's report to the Jamaican Parliament on investigations into Chamber's death outlines that in October 1986, six years after his detention, he made an application to the Governor General for a reprieve. This was not possible because he would need to make an initial court appearance before his application could be forwarded to that office (Chang, 2020; Public Broadcasting Corporation of Jamaica, 2020). Chambers was now waiting, according to Section 25(A) of the Criminal Justice (Administration) Act, for a medical practitioner approved by the court to determine his fitness for trial. The next recorded action was in December 2000, 20 years after his initial detention and 14 years after his application to the Governor General, when Chambers’ family requested that he be released on parole. The minister indicated that the legal advice he received suggests that neither reprieve nor parole can be granted to individuals who have not been convicted and sentenced (Chang, 2020). Twenty years after his detention, Chambers was thus not able to appeal to the persons at whose “pleasure” he was being detained. He was, therefore, fighting to show that he had presence of mind and was waiting on the legal system to establish his mental readiness to stand trial.

His loved ones were also forced to wait with him for 40 long years. According to his sister, the family had been trying to get representation for him since 1979 at his initial detainment in police lockup and subsequently when he was remanded into custody in 1980 (Jamaica Gleaner, 2020). She also reached out to the Governor General but was redirected to the Ministry of National Security. She was then referred to the Legal Aid Council, a statutory body under the Ministry of Justice that provides legal counsel to citizens in criminal matters. The Legal Aid Council promised her they would write to the Governor General on Chamber's behalf. However, upon visiting the Council, she learned that Chambers had already written to the office and that a file had been opened for him. From this, we believe that Chambers was trying to use all available channels to have his case heard, and his family members were doing the same. The question of his being unfit to stand trial remains a contentious point and is cast further into doubt by his family's assertion that they did not observe him displaying signs of mental illness.

This is not surprising because he received several Fitness for Trial Certificates, but he was still not given a court date. The INDECOM report shows that in October 2003, 23 years after his detention, a psychiatric evaluation stated:

This inmate has no history of mental illness. Repeated mental examinations revealed that there is no mental disorder, and he is, therefore, competent to stand trial. He is not on any medication and is not a risk to himself or anyone at the time. (INDECOM, 2020: 5)

The report further indicates that Chambers received medical assessments confirming his fitness in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Additionally, the Minister of National Security informed the Jamaican Parliament that a psychiatric evaluation conducted in 2016 also certified Chambers as fit. Consequently, he was added to a list of cases to be brought before the courts in 2017 (Chang, 2020). This would mean an opportunity to stand trial after 37 years of being detained. Two years before his death, his sister noticed his health deteriorating, and he seemed disoriented. His final medical records, presented by the Minister of National Security to the Jamaican Parliament, showed that in August 2019, he showed signs of confusion and had stopped eating. He was diagnosed with dementia and received medical care but tragically died on 27 January 2020, of acute pyelonephritis. Photographs of his severely emaciated body were leaked to the media, sparking public outrage. The demands for accountability that followed his death prompted the state to investigate similar cases, including that of George Williams, who was released in the wake of Chambers’ death after having been incarcerated for fifty years without trial (Clarke 2020).

Kashif Ali: indefinite detention in Canada

Canada is unusual, particularly among industrialized countries, in permitting indefinite detention of migrants. Under legislation upheld repeatedly by Canada's Supreme Court, people can be, and are, detained for months or years with no clear end date in policy or practice. “Failed” refugee claimants, as they are called (that is, people who have applied for refugee status but the government has refused their petition), people without legal status, people deemed a threat to national security, or anyone stripped of their permanent resident status because of criminal convictions may be detained by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) prior to deportation if the CBSA judges that they pose a flight risk, a danger to the public, or if their identity and nationality cannot be confirmed. This is almost always an administrative determination rather than one made by an independent judge.

In theory, migrant detention is not punitive. Nevertheless, migrants are often held in penitentiary settings, even maximum security, under the same conditions as people sentenced for criminal conduct. According to a human rights report:

While immigration detainees are not serving criminal sentences, they are often treated like people incarcerated for criminal offences: handcuffed, shackled, searched, subjected to solitary confinement, and restricted to small spaces with rigid routines and under constant surveillance, with severely limited access to the outside world. In provincial jails,⁷ many immigration detainees are confined in tense and even dangerous environments where they may be subjected to violence. Immigration detainees who are from communities of colour, particularly detainees who are Black, appear to be incarcerated for longer periods in immigration detention and they are often detained in provincial jails rather than immigration holding centres. (Gros, 2021)

Detained migrants in Canada generally have their cases reviewed in a live hearing after 24 hours, after 1 week, and then once a month. During these hearings, an administrator from the Immigration and Refugee Board considers whether continued detention is necessary, and the detainee is reminded of their rights.

Despite this scrupulous attention to procedure, detainees are sometimes held for years—as was the case with Kashif Ali, who waited seven years in migrant detention stasis. In a transcript of his detention review hearing on 6 June 2016, Ali appeared via teleconference and said, “You’re torturing me. You’re killing me … I’m not fighting to stay in the country” (Kennedy, 2017). Although Ali wished to be deported to Ghana, he was unable to prove his citizenship, and so Ghana would not accept him. In the interview, Ali went on to say:

I have no access to any documents. So when they say I’m not co-operating, in which way? I can’t tell them what I don’t know and I can’t give them what I don’t have… I didn’t have any idea I would be sitting here this long. And how much time do I have left to do? (Kennedy, 2017 and Jackson, 2017)

According to his daughter, Sakina Millington: “All he knows is life in jail now. He can’t picture what the outside world is like anymore… It's like he's stuck in the past and his recent, or present reality is prison. And it's hard and it's cold. It's like all the love and excitement and passion has been sucked out of him” (Jackson, 2017).

Ali reflected on his Kafkaesque predicament as the number of monthly review hearings mounted: “Each and every day you go to the hearing and all they say is, ‘You’re a danger to society and you’re a flight risk.’ But they don’t explain what they’re doing in order to be able to remove you.” Ali had gone through eighty review hearings at that point. He adds, “I came here to be able to stay here. If I can’t stay here, why am I sitting in the jail? And I’m getting old. I’m 51 years old now. So, what am I living for?” (Kennedy, 2017).

After Ali had been detained for seven years, an Ontario judge granted Ali conditional release on a writ of habeas corpus. However, lengthy, open-ended detention continues to be practiced in Canada. Abdirahmaan Warssama was held for five years, and Alvin Brown was held for five years before being deported. Ebrahim Toure was held for five and a half years. After serving a jail sentence, Abdurahman Hassan, who was schizophrenic, was held on an immigrant detention hold for three years in a maximum-security provincial jail in Ontario, including lengthy segregation. He died in detention after being held down by two officers who held a towel to his mouth. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International uncovered a case of a mentally ill man held for 11 years whose identity the government could not establish (Gros, 2021).

Many detainees are held because they cannot prove their identity or citizenship. Part of the problem is structural. According to UNICEF, roughly 40% of the world's infants lack a birth certificate (2024). People who lack birth certificates often have trouble obtaining other essential documents (driver's licenses, national identification cards, passports, health cards, marriage and death certificates, and so on). It is disproportionately the world's poor who lack these essential documents. Although the CBSA does not track race in its statistics, anecdotal knowledge suggests that the detainee population in Canada is disproportionately racialized as non-white.

Conclusion

Endemic waiting is an extension of colonial structures of disproportionate surveillance, racialization, oppression, and domination. Racialized people, the working class, and others marked by difference are subject to greater contact with state actors and oppressive structures that place them (and their bodies) at heightened risk of being put in a state of temporicide. Temporicide is a kind of punishment, even if not always acknowledged as such. It is a kind of waiting that almost subjected Cyntoia Brown-Long to a life-trashing sentence of 51 years at the early age of 16, effectively placing her life on hold while deferring and shortening any dream of a life beyond bars. Without the public outcry surrounding her case to liberate her, she would still be waiting. Temporicide is the kind of waiting that confined Chambers to an eternal now and denied him any future possibilities as he died awaiting sentencing—or even proper adjudication—in a Jamaican prison. In an interview following his death, his sister recounts telling him about the death of their father, mother, and other sister, “My father died in 2004, him shake him head. Then now when my mother died in 2013, him shake him head, my sister died 2014, 11 months after, he cried. I was thinking it's because father died, mother died, and sister died and he was not there” (Jamaica Gleaner, 2020). What Chambers’ tears meant was not shared with us, but we do know that he missed time with family members, the memories of those maturing from childhood to adulthood, and the final moments of those who had died. Temporicide is the kind of waiting that Kashif Ali, without documents to prove his identity or citizenship, was forced to endure under an indefinitely long hold in a penitentiary setting, a maddening stasis with no exit in sight. Under the unusual immigrant detention scheme in Canada, he was placed in limbo and his life was effectively suspended for an indeterminate length of time: “You feel like you’re in jail forever,” commented Ali (Kennedy, 2017). His condition of temporicide verges into absolute rightlessness—he is deprived of the right to have rights, to use Hannah Arendt's (1958: 296–298) phrase.

Across the broad differences—in national legal frameworks, in identity, in citizenship status—we have tried to adduce temporicide as a throughline. Temporicide is an extended lesson in abjection. This pedagogical space designates a gray area between intention and non-intention. Our case that temporicide is a social category worthy of analysis does not rest on demonstrating intention; rather, we point to the logics of racial capitalism, which organizes social systems that subject people to social death and slow physical death at the behest of the state—consistent with Mbembe's necropolitics. Temporicide is a nether plane, exiled from the usual time-space coordinates that govern both racial capitalism and conventional legal systems within the nation-state, even as temporicide is the product of both racial capitalism and fostered by a particular nation-state.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the Binghamton University Sociology Department, which brought us together.

Data availability

Almost all data used is publicly available and non-proprietary. One interview conducted by coauthor Gabreélla Friday was with a public figure from her personal research. Data are available from the authors upon request.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research was partially supported by funds from the Faculty of Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University.

ORCID iDs

Gabreélla Friday

Joshua Price

Notes

Author biographies

Gabreélla (Ella) Friday is an assistant professor of criminology in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at St John's University. Her research centers on how time is used and manipulated by institutional and political actors to create and reproduce social inequalities along racialized, gendered, and heteronormative lines, particularly in carceral spaces. Moreover, she uses engaged and activist methods to address and alleviate issues faced by those impacted by imprisonment and their communities.

Joshua Price is a professor of criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He writes on structural and institutional violence, race and gender violence, incarceration, and life after incarceration. He is the author of Prison and Social Death (2016) and Translation and Epistemicide: Racialization of Language in the Americas (2023).

Nicola Satchell is a lecturer in the Department of Government at The University of the West Indies, and recently completed her PhD in sociology at SUNY Binghamton. Her research unpacks the issues of crime and social justice in the anglophone Caribbean from an ecological perspective. Satchell has conducted work funded and published by the Inter-American Development Bank on persons deprived of their liberty in Jamaica.

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