Not surprisingly, some people flee from this horrific emptiness into the embrace of psychotropics. Thorazine, Prolixin, and Haldol are readily available from the shrinks and prison pharmacy to render inmates insensate to timelessness. So are illegal drugs, which are merely a channel change that leads to the same obliviousness. Some, for similar reasons, dabble in the occult. In prison, time is intentionally dragged to a crawl by intense regimentation.
Meals take place at a certain time.
Shaves are scheduled for a certain hour. The institution strives to create a routine that differs little from day to day. The hypnotic sameness makes it appear as if every day is like the day that came before, and every week an echo of the week that preceded it, and every month the same, and every year the same, the same-the still, unchanging same. In prison, time is a thick, dull mallet that pounds consciousness into a coma. They leave a dark place where time crawled and are expected to find a meaningful, productive niche in a social order that races at baud rates and dances to the surging rhythms of the Dow Jones industrial average.