7 May 2026
On how prison robs a person of time and forces them to learn how to live again without it
by Lev Shlosberg
Source: Novaya Gazeta
A person in prison loses their sense of time. A person needs two constant points of reference to determine their place in ordinary life: a sense of time and an understanding of space.
Defining oneself in terms of time and space allows a person to understand what is happening to them, gauge their strength, make decisions, and take action.
The support that comes from knowing the exact time is taken away from a person in prison. Staff are not allowed to tell a prisoner what time it is. No one can clearly explain the origins of this prohibition, but most likely, it is part of a larger system of restrictions designed to prevent a person deprived of their freedom from coordinating their actions with anyone inside or outside the prison. A prisoner has no way of knowing the position of the clock’s hands on the dial.
The exact time enters a prisoner’s life twice a day via an announcer’s voice: at 6 a.m. you hear, “Attention, wake up!” and at 10 p.m., “Attention, lights out!” At 9:45 p.m., a warning sounds indicating that there are 15 minutes left to prepare for bed.
There are approximate time markers in prison: breakfast around 7 a.m., lunch around noon, and dinner around 4 p.m. You could see the exact time on the digital clock in the hallway outside the exercise yards; they lead you down this hallway to the exercise yard, the bathhouse, a meeting with a lawyer, or for interrogation. But one night after Christmas, the hands of that clock froze at 3:25 and have been stuck there ever since: the battery died. It’s impossible to guess how many days, weeks, or months it will take to replace it.
The same clock (still working) hangs on the wall of the corridor in the administrative building, where you are taken for visits with family, lawyers, or for investigative procedures.
One way or another, a prisoner can check the time during a rare convenient moment, but a person in prison has no constant access to knowing the exact time.
The lack of precise knowledge of the time seems to push the prisoner toward the realization that you yourself must not plan, calculate, or do anything: the system, with its built-in schedule, has determined everything for you—you’re in prison, so don’t think.
We’ve grown accustomed not just to knowing the exact time, but to constantly seeing it before us: clocks, smartphones, computers, household appliances, and practically any gadget include a time display. Everyday knowledge of the exact time has become the backdrop of modern life. This has become a habit that has turned into a need and even a kind of dependency.
In prison, a person’s connection to the present time is severed. A challenge arises: to live each day fully, without knowing the exact time—and, moreover, without paying attention to this lack of knowledge.
For a person in prison, the day becomes the fixed unit of time. You switch to a broader unit of time—a sort of approximation within which you must maintain a sense of time—without information about the exact time.
You have to learn to get everything done in a day that needs to be done, relying on your internal sense of time and the approximate markers provided by the prison itself.
In such a situation, you develop new units of time—unthinkable anywhere else—that could be considered arbitrary, yet they are quite concrete: from wake-up to breakfast, from breakfast to morning roll call, walk in the exercise yard (held immediately after morning roll call for one hour), from the end of the walk until lunch, from lunch until dinner, from dinner until the evening roll call, from the evening roll call until lights out. You plan your entire daily life around these time slots: writing letters, reading books, preparing for meetings with your lawyer and court hearings, writing, cleaning, and laundry.
Larger units of time, as it turns out, don’t get in the way of anything: if you know how to fill that time.
In prison, you learn not to pay attention to the exact time, because knowing it isn’t vital for organizing your life behind bars.
Socrates is credited with the saying: “How many things there are in the world that I have absolutely no need for.” Prison teaches a person there are in fact many such things. The realisation that you actually don’t need many things you are used only comes in a situation in which what you are used to becomes inaccessible.
The clock on the dial gives way to an internal clock, the setting of which depends solely on you. You check this clock every day, connecting the units of prison time with what you want to do during that time.
An old journalistic cliché—day after day—surprisingly fits the description of the passage of time for a person imprisoned. The day becomes the primary measure of time for a person in prison, a fixed unit of account.
For a suspect or defendant incarcerated in prison, there is another factor of time: the lack of knowledge about how long you will be here. The prosecution goes to court with a motion to extend the pretrial detention, usually every two months. Everyone knows the maximum terms of pre-trial detention, but there are many ways to circumvent them; loopholes remain in the law.
Every two months, you hope to secure a reduction in your pretrial detention (you can’t help but believe in what you’re asking the court for), but the practice of the Russian judicial system shows it is much easier to say ‘no’ to a prisoner and their lawyer than to do the same to an investigator or prosecutor (which, in most cases in our country today, are one and the same).
Life in prison teaches you not to set your sights on a specific length of time for your stay here. This is harder than learning to manage your time throughout the day, because the realization that there is no time limit is far more dramatic for a person than not knowing about an exact length of time.
It is human nature to want to know the limits and periods of time. This helps us make decisions and allocate time and energy, as if cutting strips of ribbon with scissors. It is psychologically difficult to distance oneself from this need, but it is necessary to develop one’s own attitude toward the lack of limits.
There is only one way out: to plan your life beyond these shifting boundaries, without tying your plans and calculations to possible dates for changes in your sentence. Figuratively speaking, you must learn to overcome and cross these boundaries without fragmenting your life into these intervals of time — which, by and large, are beyond your control — and without stumbling over them.
And there is the most fundamental dimension and understanding of time in prison: it is the time of deprivation of liberty, a time of lack of freedom in your life. You need to incorporate, to accept this piece of ‘unfreedom’ into your life and not let it break you.
Until a verdict is handed down, this time remains completely uncertain.
You and your defence attorneys are fighting for a full acquittal (the statistics on acquittals in Russia today are a verdict on the Russian justice system), but in order to withstand a potential blow, you must accept the idea that the content of a person’s life while in physical confinement depends not only on the conditions of that confinement but also on how you fill that time of confinement, regardless of how long it lasts. This is particularly difficult. It requires a person to recognize the value of their own decisions regarding the content of life in conditions of imprisonment.
Time constantly reminds us of the finitude of human life. Imprisonment involuntarily creates for a person a vitally necessary possibility — to learn to live beyond time, overcoming its finitude through the work of the mind, which does not depend on a person’s place in space and time and which a person cannot control, but can nonetheless organise their time—literally, organise themselves.
By overcoming dependence on time, a person remains free while enduring the constraints of imprisonment.
Pskov Prison Fortress
Translated by RiR
