If we approach prison as a temporal category, how does that bring new insights into our understanding of carcerality? Drawing on human rights’ reports, prison literature, public testimonies, and interviews with former prisoners and their families in Tunisia, this paper focuses on Tunisian political prisoners who were incarcerated between 1960 and 2010. The paper challenges the delimited, material conception of the prison by exploring the temporal experience of incarceration that often continues beyond time in prison. I focus on “administrative control” (raqāba idāriyya)— a police practice where former prisoners are placed under forced surveillance after their release for a period that can range from a few months to an indefinite number of years, requiring them to report to particular police stations multiple times a day, in the process purposefully disrupting their ability to maintain employment and sustain housing. Through the lens of temporality, surveillance studies, theories of incarceration, and borders, I examine incarceration in its physical, social, and temporal dimensions as it extends beyond the prison walls. I ask: How does “administrative control” in the aftermath of time in prison redefine how we conceptualize incarceration? One aim of this project is to investigate the particularity of the modern prison experience for Tunisian political prisoners in comparison to other carceral regimes in the region. Beyond the Tunisian context, the paper also seeks to challenge the trauma framework that has come to dominate how we conceptualize post-prison experiences, and to rethink them through the prism of carceral, state logics and their policing of former prisoners’ temporal lives.