Despite its centrality to penal philosophy, sentencing practice, and the lived experience of punishment, time remains an under-theorised dimension within criminology and socio-legal scholarship. This presentation foregrounds temporality as a structuring logic of punishment, examining how it operates discursively, institutionally, and experientially. Criminal sanctions are most commonly quantified through temporal categories, for example life imprisonment, indeterminate or extended sentences. Yet the language through which these are articulated simultaneously illuminates and obscures their temporal dimensions. At the experiential level, familiar idioms such as ‘doing time’ or ‘serving time’ reinforce imprisonment as the paradigmatic temporal punishment, while the bulk of scholarly attention has focused on the distinctive modalities of carceral time. This emphasis, however, risks neglecting the temporal burdens of penal measures beyond the prison, including probation, parole, and criminal records, which extends penal temporality into the life course and across social domains. Different penal philosophies including retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation also imply different temporal orderings. Bringing together these strands, this presentation will explore temporality as both an analytic lens and a constitutive element of penal power.

Professor Nicola Carr (Trinity College Dublin)

This event takes place in Wednesday 12 November at 1pm in Board Room 2, School of Law, QUB (MST.08.014).