Lisa Guenther,Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

Abstract

Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2013, 368 pp. (including index): 9780816679591, $ 22.47 (pbk), $ 71.25 (cloth)

‘There are many ways to destroy a person’, writes Lisa Guenther, ‘but one of the simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement’ (p. xi). Her latest book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, paints a vivid and tortured picture of prisons within prisons, purposefully designed spaces where the state uses strategies it knows will produce madness. The book appears alongside and in the service of a complicated coalition of prisoners, activists, scholars, and members of Congress demanding a reconsideration of the practice. Guenther’s work challenges the violence of an institution that concentrates poor people and people of color in the already violent institution of mass incarceration. As the United States continues to design a carceral democracy with higher incarceration rates than even the most authoritarian regimes, Guenther’s Solitary Confinement is critically important in its timing and in its refusal to situate social science as the answer to all of the prison’s problems.

The book sets out to demonstrate that forced periods of total solitude erode not only the social and psychological characteristics that make prisoners people, but also the ‘most basic sense of identity’ that orders the sense of self and the world (p. xi). Guenther’s phenomenological approach defines concrete personhood as ‘the whole complex of interrelations within and among a multileveled self, a concrete world, and the other concrete egos who constitute this world’ (p. 29). As this complex is thrown into crisis by recurrent visions of things unseen, it becomes possible and even likely that ‘one’s own sense of personhood’ will ‘diminish or even collapse’ (p. 34). Guenther argues that the solitary prison purposefully turns people into physically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially deteriorated beings that are not allowed to live even the most fundamental aspects of a life. As a result, she asks, ‘How must concrete personhood be structured in order to be diminished so radically by the prolonged deprivation of the bodily presence of other people?’ (p. 23).

While solitary confinement has burdened the prison since its earliest instances, and generations of scholars have shown that prison custodians know fully the madness of sensory deprivation, Guenther’s intervention is striking in its rearrangement of the problem of prison solitude. She refuses the more conventional rehearsal of the insanity of prisoners, and asks instead what the solitary prison’s double condition of living death means for the very constitution of subjectivity:

What does it mean to recognize, as the effect of a standard method of incarceration, the possibility of a suffering that blurs the distinction between life and death? What must subjectivity be like in order for these effects to be possible? Who are we, such that we can become unhinged from ourselves by being separated from others? (p. xii)

Drawing from phenomenology the ideas of selves in relation and lives in resistance, Guenther’s contribution deepens theories of civil and social deaths to explore how solitary confinement turns being-in-the-world back on itself, depriving consciousness of a ‘diverse, open-ended perceptual experience of the world’ (p. xv). The torture of sensory deprivation ‘cuts prisoners off from [a] network of social, cognitive, perceptual, affective, and even ontological support, turning prisoners’ capacity for meaning, and for meaningful relationships, against itself to the point of incapacitation’ (p. 146). The prison that relies on forced solitude therefore exploits fundamental forms of relationality, making civilly dead prisoners into subjects of a social death that is often permanent. The mind’s turning back on itself is therefore produced by a regime that seeks control beyond all sense.

Guenther’s work will be important for scholars who write and teach about the crisis of punishment in an ever-widening range of disciplines. It will allow scholars, students, and prisoners to reconsider not only the structured environment of sensory deprivation, but also the various forms of resistance that emerge, as prisoners contest the conditions of possibility that the solitary prison produces. Prisoners reclaim their senses at great personal risk in institutions governed by the sanitized rubrics of administrative segregation and secured housing. In resurrecting the self, prisoners cultivate ‘death as a way of life’, embracing ‘a certain relationship to death and to the possibility of meaningful relationships to oneself, to others, and to the world both within and beyond the constraints of social death’ (p. 53). This re-personalization resists the prison’s depersonalization – one best understood, according to Guenther, as a form of de-animalization, since prisoners often narrate an experience of being treated ‘worse than animals’ (p. 126). Guenther’s narrative makes teachers of prisoners who have fashioned afterlives of solitary confinement, and builds a rich archive that other scholars will find useful in building a world without prisons.

In treating prisoners as humans even as she draws attention to the limitations of a human rights approach, Guenther concludes that the language of solitary confinement actually fails to name the true violence of the practice. This is perhaps her most powerful intervention. Most people living in the so-called free world, bombarded by prison images that shape a particular relationship between the prison’s inside and its outside, presume that solitary confinement is a practice that imposes a total absence of contact. Guenther powerfully argues that the solitary regime is a carceral space defined instead by a politics of forced interaction. She writes that solitary confinement is a ‘highly mediated, intensely “social” space insofar as it leaves inmates no room to withdraw from the forced relationality of constant surveillance and control’ (p. 147). The state stages an interaction between prisoners and their keepers in a social space designed to require strip searches, cell extractions, and pharmaceutical and physical restraints. This is the failed promise of the prison’s redemption, one that is endemic to its structure and one that requires an abolitionist politics that takes seriously the role of social science in making unhinged prisoners and unhinged guards.

As Solitary Confinement unravels the historical meaning of the practice, it offers a periodization that highlights three waves of its widespread adoption – its origin in 19th-century rehabilitative ideals of penitence and rebirth, its reemergence in the 1960s and 1970s as a behavioralist science that medicalized crime and politicized medicine, and its most recent instantiation in the 1980s as a regime of total isolation and control under the rubric of institutional ‘security’. Because this focus on moments of the practice’s resurrection, instead of the history of its abolition, elides previous forms of the practice’s demise, perhaps Solitary Confinement misses something in its adherence to a wave analogy that limits its lessons.

The strength of the work’s periodization, however, is that it reads solitary confinement’s relationship to American behavioralism’s wartime science of persuasion, one that continues to shadow life inside prison walls. Guenther reveals how behavioral science produced a series of mind modification programs borrowed from anti-democratic regimes in the course of US wars. State and federal prisons used these techniques against a civilian population in violation of domestic law, and taught policymakers, wardens, and custodial staff that opinions could be guided through the creation of structured-choice environments controlled by ‘rational decisions’ to live. Guenther’s critique of social science’s domestication of wartime prison practices does incredible work in finally putting behavioralism in its place, and in revealing ‘the complicity of behaviorism’s core assumptions with the violence of its experiments and its applications’ (p. 120).

The science of Cold War imprisonment has led, in the 21st century, to a normalized ‘era of the control prison’ that structures mass incarceration (p. xvi). People who live in US prisons have become ‘risks to be managed, resistances to be eliminated, and organisms to be fed, maintained, and even prevented from taking their own lives’ (p. xvi). This securitized prison regime is supported by a legal architecture that has formally abandoned ‘that rehabilitation thing’, as US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia called it during oral arguments in Miller v. Alabama (2012: 132 S.Ct. 2455). In condemning criminalized youth to a lifetime of punishment without any possibility of parole, the dissenting justices argued that penology’s promise of rehabilitation had been abandoned for a new legal process of ‘deserved punishment’ (p. 58). Those said to deserve life in a control prison will endure an impossible demand for accountability in a prison that actively works to undermine their very capacity for a sense of responsibility to themselves and to others. Ending her insightful work with the consequences of solitary confinement’s continued place within mass incarceration, Guenther resists the prison’s division of the living from the living dead by asking, ‘Who might we become together if we joined in solidarity to create new afterlives in resistance to social death?’ (p. 256).