Getting Short

In the prison system, time is abstract yet omnipresent. It is tracked obsessively in paperwork, debated over in court hearings, and measured in exacting increments intended to offer a sense of clarity. Yet among the men serving it at my facility, time is rarely spoken of directly. Not because it is unimportant, but because naming it plainly would require confronting how much has already been taken, and how little control remains over what is left.

Instead, time is often softened through language. Men at Eastern Correctional Facility do not typically say that they are serving decades. They say they are “getting short.” The phrase is casual, but the message is clear: time, an unspecified amount of it, is dwindling. Something better is surely approaching. No one specifies dates or compares calendars. “Getting short” is less a claim about release than a way of orienting oneself inside a system where the terms of the future are set by distant authorities who are rarely visible.

Last November, I sat shoulder to shoulder with my peers in the metal chairs of our auditorium, designed, like everything else, for durability. Our entire housing unit had been evacuated for a cell extraction, a routine procedure where a resident is forcibly removed from a cell when they refuse orders or are believed to pose a threat to themselves or others. The resident in question—who suffered from severe mental illness and frequently experienced delusions and schizophrenic episodes—was removed by at least six officers wearing helmets and protective gear.

In the process, our entire unit—roughly seventy men—were exposed to a chemical agent used during the extraction. After more than eleven years in prison, I have experienced both MK-9 and standard pepper spray, and the agent felt stronger than either. The residue lingered long after the incident itself, drifting through vents and corridors, burning eyes and throats. We were to wait in the auditorium for an unspecified amount of time while the unit aired out.

In the auditorium, dozens of small conversations overlapped with one another, creating a restless hum that filled the air. The air felt stale and heavy. Several men held washcloths over their mouths and noses, suppressing coughs into the fabric. Somewhere in the room a faint smell of a burning cigarette drifted through the air, the result of someone who could not resist lighting one even in the middle of the disruption. “I’m getting short,” I heard one man say casually, leaning back in his chair. Another nodded. “Yeah. Me too.” The exchange did not invite follow-up, nor was it meant to.

Over the weeks that followed, I listened more consciously for the phrase. It had become part of the background language of my prison, but I hadn’t thought too critically about it before. I noticed as the phrase surfaced in the yard, in meal-time lines, during quiet moments in the housing unit. It appeared most often after parole denials, lockdowns, and news from home that could not be acted upon. It seemed to function less as a concrete description of time remaining than as a response to uncertainty. It was a coping mechanism. A way of imposing movement on a system designed to suspend it.

What struck me was that the men using the phrase were not all close to release. In fact, those close to release did not speak openly about their imminent freedom; that could impose an unnecessary cruelty. The men who were “getting short” had years left, or decades. Some did not know whether they would go home.

One man I spoke with tied the phrase directly to the midpoint of his sentence: “Getting short means I made it over the 50 percent mark of my bid,” he said. “Now I’ve got less time left than I already served.” Another man described it differently. “It’s how you keep yourself from thinking too far ahead,” he told me. “If you think about all of it at once, it’ll crush you.” A third was more direct. “It’s just a way to lie to yourself without feeling like you’re lying.”

Prison distorts time in obvious ways. Days blur together. Seasons pass without markers. Years are tallied in forms and files rather than memory. Time moves slowest when there is nothing anchoring the day. When a semester ends and classes stop, or when programs pause, the hours stretch in ways that feel painfully long. Without structure, the day loses its shape.

Beyond this structural distortion is a psychological one. Time in prison is not simply endured; it is carefully managed. Language becomes one of the primary tools for that management. Prison culture contains numerous phrases that soften its realities. Solitary confinement is often referred to simply as “the box” or “the coop.” State prison itself may be called “up north.” Someone who has spent decades incarcerated might be described as an “old-timer.” These expressions do not change the conditions they describe, but they allow people to speak about them without repeating the full weight of the words.

Incarceration is not only about confinement, but also about duration. It forces people to live inside an overwhelming expanse of time that cannot be meaningfully altered. The system does not simply take years of your life. It takes its most powerful moments. Since my incarceration, I have missed the birth of my little cousin, my mother’s wedding. I was unable to attend the funerals of my stepmother, my grandmother, and several close friends. Soon enough, I will miss my godson’s graduation and prom.

Worst of all, prison requires you to coexist with the knowledge of its taking.

“Getting short” interrupts that awareness. It introduces a sense of forward movement, even when freedom is imagined, even when it is fragile, even when it’s not clear that it will be better than what came before, or what still waits on the other end.

One man I spoke with had already served more than twenty years. His parole hearings had been repeatedly denied. Still, he referred to himself as getting short. “I don’t mean short like next week,” he clarified. “I mean shorter than I was.” Another man rejected the phrase entirely. “I don’t say that,” he told me. “Because if something happens and I’m not out when I think I should be, it messes me up.” His refusal revealed the risk embedded in the language. To imagine closeness to freedom is to invite disappointment. To speak optimism aloud in prison is to make yourself vulnerable.

The danger is that this kind of linguistic adaptation can be mistaken for evidence that incarceration is tolerable, that people can adjust to it while retaining their full humanity, that time does not wound as deeply as abolitionists claim that it does. But the very fact that time must be renamed in order to be endured reveals the extent of its psychological burden.

Language does not change or shorten sentences, but it does help shape how they are lived. “Getting short” allows men to experience progress. It offers a way to remain oriented forward without collapsing under the scale of what remains. In prison, and in life, the one promise is that time will move forward. One way or another, nothing will last. To say you are getting short is not to deny your sentence. It is to refuse its full psychological weight.

I am serving a sentence of twenty years to life. I have been incarcerated since August 2, 2014. My parole eligibility date is January 2035. I don’t say that I’m getting short. But “getting short” is happening quietly, every day, all around me. It is happening in auditoriums, ad-seg units, shower stalls. It is happening when I dream of a future with my wife: a quiet night in our home, snow falling outside the window, a blanket covering our legs on the couch. Is it happening during count and after lockdown, on phone calls with our loved ones. And in the event of a prison transfer, or a parole denial, or a sentence extension, hope too skips over.

_{Source image: Daniele Levis Pelusi / Unsplash}

Contributors

Devin A. Giordano Devin A. Giordano is an incarcerated freelance writer and student in the Bard Prison Initiative. He cofounded You Are Not Alone, a nonprofit committed to shifting the culture of how men treat women by confronting violence.

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• Institutions & Practices

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• conditions of confinement
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors
• long sentences