![]() ![]() The social scientist and criminologist J. Indeed, we expect remorse from those we imprison. One could argue that this is a form of apology, repentance for having slipped “down into the easy, dangerous ways which lead to disaster.” They don’t express hope for the new year, but rather focus on lamenting time lost, “as we look back over the twelve months and feel how little has been accomplished.” Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Hour Glass, 1935 In their introduction, they observe that while “the same sands” run through an hourglass, the hours they represent pass “forever.” The writers are referring to the year’s end, and, as they “tear off the last pages of the 1935 calendar,” their outlook is unusual. The writers of The Hour Glass seem acutely aware of this contradiction in measuring time. Instead, as illustrated by the clepsydra, “we are forced to have recourse to the measurement of something else.” One cannot simply “take a little ‘chunk of time’” and put it against a measuring stick, they write. One scholar, writing about the clepsydra and other early time-keeping devices, emphasized the quandary of measuring time, a concept without physical substance. In their introduction they observe that while “the same sands” run through an hourglass, the hours they represent pass “forever.” “To lose water” meant to waste one’s time meanwhile, the Greeks called the clepsydra, literally, “water-thief.” The devices were used in Roman courts, through which they entered common parlance. Similar to an hourglass, a clepsydra measures time through the transfer of water from one vessel to another. It’s prefaced with the descriptions of several time-keeping devices, among them a water clock called a clepsydra. The first issue of The Hour Glass was published in November 1935. “Duties are many and varied,” a woman named Ethel Cooper wrote in 1935, describing a typical day on the farm, “from planting tulip bulbs and roses in our garden to teaching a calf to drink.”īut three surviving issues of the Farm’s internal newsletter-called, evocatively, The Hour Glass-reveal familiar truths about how incarceration, in any guise, distorts a prisoner’s sense of time in ways that run counter to its intended purpose. Built on an old farm in Niantic, a coastal village in Connecticut, this early correctional facility made exclusively for women consisted of a few scattered cottages, a vegetable garden, and a dairy farm. The Connecticut State Farm for Women was a triumph of progressive reform when it opened its doors to twelve prisoners in 1918. ![]()
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