Disrupting Time: Kinship, Temporary Parole, and Black Women’s Fugitive Interludes from Alabama Prisons

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Alabama’s carceral state invoked a legal power that was enshrined, practiced, and located in slavery: the power to rupture filial relationships as punishment. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, incarcerated Black women were systematically separated from their loved ones and communities: a feature of incarceration that has been naturalized in our conception of American prisons but that merits rigorous historical attention. I argue that we must understand carceral separation as historically-rooted in slavery and that it was a particularly gendered form of intergenerational violence in two senses: first that women’s detention and disappearance had catastrophic, and rippling effects, across multiple generations of family; and second, that forced parting occurred across many generations even after the end of slavery.

Forced separation was a spatial violence that robbed people of time with each other. How did incarcerated Black women respond to this denial of time through fugitive practices? In prison, time ensnared incarcerated women: it procured the permanence of prison walls and indemnified the temporality of freedom. This paper then also examines how incarcerated Black women attempted to respond to this intergenerational violence by absconding from what was called temporary parole. Developed through the twinned emergence of state austerity and progressive-era policies, temporary parole was an uneven policy that sent incarcerated people home for thirty, sixty, or ninety day periods, which could be extended or revoked. At the end of temporary parole, whenever prison officials deemed that was, there was the expectation of surrender and return to the prison. Through incarcerated Black women’s correspondence and state archives, this paper reconstructs the practice of running away while on temporary parole as a way to literally steal time from the state and thus transform it from a mechanism of delimitation into a powerful abstraction of perpetuity.