Abstract
In this book, David Polizzi presents other perspectives than those usually employed by both prison authorities and criminologists in discussions on solitary confinement. He brings to the forefront characteristics of prison systems, isolation and prisoners’ experiences rarely displayed. The book starts with his encounter with solitary confinement, isolation. As a pre-doctoral clinical intern with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) he worked for half a year in a 400-bed housing unit that included administratively and disciplinary custody prisoners (p. 1). Recognizing that these experiences are part of an increasing use of isolation in prisons and entire institutions, this question came to his mind of: ‘how we have got to this moment in correctional praxis such that we are now returning to a philosophy of confinement that has clearly shown to provide very little rehabilitative benefit’ (p. 14); and, as stated elsewhere, with heavily disruptive effects on prisoners. This question is relevant also in Nordic countries, though isolation is used to a lesser extent here than in the USA.
Polizzi discusses isolation according to three themes: history; the prison system; and the impact of isolation on prisoners. These are common themes in discussing isolation, but Polizzi’s perspectives are uncommon, most wanted, most needed. He goes beyond the typical frames of prison policy aims and anticipated effects, and beyond typologies of prisoners and their acts. This book is about the surroundings, systems, social rooms that are created where inconceivable and bewildering interventions may happen, and they do. Not by accident, nor as exceptions, but as integrated parts of their surroundings that we, as societies, have established.
To answer his question, Polizzi describes the beginning of it all, when isolation was introduced in the 1830s as a reform of good intentions, to improve prison conditions and prisoners, by means of isolation, repentance and Bible. This was decisive; now isolation was introduced into the prison system, and it has not left since. This legacy from the early 1800s informed the social landscape of crime control for centuries, and for so many prisoners. In spite of a lack of wanted effects, rather producing severely damaging ones, isolation has been upheld. Polizzi describes how various reasons and rationalities, suitable at the time, have contributed to upholding the practice. Another kind of reason is practical, about the system and how to handle an increasing number of prisoners, as the answer was to store them individually.
In the 1930s, isolation became the regime of whole prisons, in supermax penitentiaries. Polizzi describes how these systems are possible and how they work, by using Agamben’s concepts, a state of exception is established when authorities manage to designate persons or groups as dangerous, someone/something to get rid of. Then dehumanization may start (parallel to processes of violence among individuals, cf. Katz, 1988). Latent in such acts, zones of indifference await, opening up for any relevant measure to be implemented, without any inhibition of rule of law or decency. The story of infamous criminals locked up in Alcatraz supermax penitentiary is one example of such events, other ones include the creation of the wars on drugs and on terror. In these sections, Polizzi turns the prison example into a principled understanding of systems executing control and power.
A part of this story is what may be called ‘a lawless room’. Isolation is a legal means. Even so, from his experience in the Pennsylvania DOC, Polizzi tells two client stories where prison staff fabricated data against prisoners in order to implement their isolation. Inside the very system that enforces the law against law-breaking citizens, which is run by detailed laws, Polizzi identifies a lawless room. Here is no rule of law, no humane considerations, no control of the controllers, even if the administration knows about the practice. Other rationalities than the judicial one, take over. These are the interests and power of staff groups pursuing the logic of the system, that of security and rationalized retribution worked into the system, and then having become routine. (Such law-less rooms exist elsewhere inside the control system, e.g. as ‘street-punishment’ by police officers, cf. Høigård, 2002.)
Lawlessness inside the law structure should make the system shudder, but it does not. Agamben explains why: ‘[t]he suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical concept’ (in Polizzi, p. 33). The system and the law prevail, while the people in question are deprived of usual judicial, political positions; they just do not exist in zones of indifference. Then the law and system can ignore them as well as what is done to them. The US Supreme Court takes part in defining away events, as Polizzi minutely describes. It may be mentioned as a process of denial, implemented by using the strongest law institution in the country.
Prison surroundings of isolation, its intentions and dehumanization of prisoners also influence staff. They grasp the messages, and their acts mirror the intentions conveyed in the material and social surroundings. Polizzi names this the ecology of evil, from Haney (p. 44 ff.). The system seems trapped within its tunnel of control and security perspectives, unable to shift to, or include, other dimensions and values. So, the answer to (what is defined as) disturbances cannot be anything else than more of the same, a further step of control that is isolation. In the USA, this driving mechanism has reached the inconceivable level of Guantanamo Bay prison.
In today’s prisons, isolation is already there, part of the system, ready to answer a suitable definition, which seems easy to provide. Once started, the practice continues like by its own weight, supporting and confirming the authorities, the institution and the definition and understanding of the crime, deviance, what the problem is and its severity, resembling a perpetuum mobile. Polizzi refers to McIntyre who sees reactions as creating a suitable definition of problems, adapting them to what the system can provide; rather than the other way around.
Polizzi efficiently shows that isolation is not an exception to prisons. In spite of all rehabilitation rhetoric, prominent in Nordic countries, isolation is an integrated part of prisons executing control and security. When isolation is not used, or used only to a small extent, it is because other considerations, values and perspectives than control and security are made relevant.
In the last chapter, Polizzi changes his scope and discusses how prisoners who have experienced isolation perceive it. In this part it is also about the surroundings, how they influence, shape, create us. Relying on the axiomatic descriptions by Merleau-Ponty and Barbaras of basic human characteristics, Polizzi opens up new and profound insights about isolation: space is not a part of our surroundings where things are placed, space is what gives us possibilities to perceive and relate to our surroundings. As much as we constitute our surroundings, they constitute us by exposing us to possibilities for moving around, taking part in and transforming our surroundings. So, when surroundings or rooms are empty, like an isolation cell, we become no one. This is frightening, not because it is unusual, but because it deprives us of any landmark, and therefore of ourselves, as is apparent in prisoners’ quotes. In isolation, prisoners are deprived of a future, stuck in the space-time of the cell and the moment. This is the brutality of isolation: ‘it fundamentally disrupts the relational ontology of human lived experiences’ (Guenther, in Polizzi, p. 78). To be deprived of one’s liberty in prison and isolation means to be treated not as a human being, which is always degrading and humiliating, and meant to be so (Bauman, 2000). The situation is similar to what Bourdieu (1999) describes as the brutality of exclusion from society, when poor people are kept outside main sectors of society, leaving them stuck in suburbs, in the moment, with no future.