Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives
Lisa Guenther
Abstract
This book offers a critical phenomenology of solitary confinement in US prisons from the early penitentiary system to present-day supermax prisons. Drawing on first-person testimony, phenomenological analysis, and critical social theory, I argue that forced isolation is a form of violence against the relational structure of living being. Many prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement describe their experience as a form of living death. They experience perceptual, affective, epistemic, and even ontological alterations that undermine their capacity to make sense of the world. Who are we, such ... More
This book offers a critical phenomenology of solitary confinement in US prisons from the early penitentiary system to present-day supermax prisons. Drawing on first-person testimony, phenomenological analysis, and critical social theory, I argue that forced isolation is a form of violence against the relational structure of living being. Many prisoners in prolonged solitary confinement describe their experience as a form of living death. They experience perceptual, affective, epistemic, and even ontological alterations that undermine their capacity to make sense of the world. Who are we, such that we can be undone by prolonged isolation from others? And how have prisoners resisted the debilitating effects of isolation?
Keywords:
solitary confinement,
prisons,
phenomenology,
racism,
slavery,
psychology,
isolation,
animal studies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816679584 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816679584.001.0001 |
