Prison life is structured by countless situations where prisoners must await authorization from authorities to carry out everyday tasks. This study analyzes waiting not as idle time but as a productive process shaping power relations between prisoners and staff. Initially focusing on the enforcement, uses, and resistance to scripturalized communications, it examines how waiting becomes a central issue in asymmetrical negotiations within prisons. While some have interpreted the emptiness of prison time as a sign of the failure of the disciplinary project analyzed by Foucault, this study argues that impatience is reframed as a moral deviance, monitored by the administration and targeted through institutional sanctions and emotional labor. Waiting thus becomes a vehicle for a diminished yet persistent disciplinary project—a discipline of emptiness. The effects of this paradoxical renewal of discipline on prisoners are examined in the final part of the paper.
Corentin Durand (Wed,) studied this question.