Living Ontological Violence: Guenther’s Solitary Confinement

In Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its After Lives, Lisa Guenther fills her immensely compelling critique of solitary confinement and the US penal system that deploys it with scenes of violence and injustices culled from testimonies of prisoners. These scenes document a comprehensive history of solitary confinement in the United States from its initial advocacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century by religious reformers; to its resurgence in the 1960s and 70s informed by the behavioral science of the Cold War and the politics of rehabilitation; and finally to the current role it plays in today’s supermax prisons underpinned by a neoliberal logic of management and control. The scenes detail states of pain, humiliation, degradation and at times, even derangement. In one scene, Guenther cites an inmate describing the now-discontinued Special Treatment and Rehabilitation Program (START), one of the first domestically implemented prison program patterned on behaviorist conditioning techniques developed during the Cold War,

They put [inmates] in the hole and they chained them, completely nude. So then the following day they give them a pair of shorts, and then the next day they give them a pencil, but no paper, and each day you progress, and if you behavior is not keeping with what they want it to be, then you start back from nothing

(Eddie Sanchez, quoted in Gómez, quoted in Guenther, 93).

If Guenther’s aim were simply to persuade the reader of the cruelty of solitary confinement and advocate for its abolishment, the recounting of such practices alone would, one hopes, suffice. Yet, she further subjects these scenes to a critical phenomenological analysis, drawing on a comprehensive survey of phenomenological thinkers from Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and, most favorably for Guenther, Emmanuel Levinas. Given the continued use of solitary confinement in the US federal and state penitentiary system (and, it should be added, other national systems) despite numerous studies, lawsuits and testimonies evidencing its harm, what might a phenomenological examination of solitary confinement show us that its horrifying descriptions alone do not?

Guenther’s book opens with a phrase by Jack Henry Abbot, “Solitary confinement can alter the ontological makeup of a stone” (quoted by Guenther, xi). In many ways, Guenther’s project can be viewed as an attempt to unpack that statement. Her claim is that there is a kind of violence wrought by solitary confinement and its various techniques of social and sensory deprivation that exceeds the type of physical and psychological harm detailed in the account of the START program. One might read such an account and easily recognize the scene as violent—as a violation of rights, psychological abuse, an attack on human dignity, and so on. But what does it mean to change the ontological makeup of a human being (much less, or more, a stone)? How does this alteration violate and how does it do so in ways that both advocates for and against solitary confinement fail to fully grasp? Finally and perhaps most pressingly given Guenther’s own admirable participation in social activism against solitary confinement, how might the attention to and articulation of such violence bolster the efforts of building, as she puts it, “a social movement of resistance to social death,” one that, she further adds, “makes good on the insights of critical phenomenology with ethical responsibility and political solidarity” (255)?

For Guenther, phenomenology provides both a method and a rich conceptual resource. Marshalling the phenomenological thesis of experience as intersubjective, intercorporeal, and interworldly, she finds in prisoners’ testimonies answers to the question, “Who are we, such that we can become unhinged from ourselves by being separated from others” (xii)? What, in other words, is it about the structure of our being that causes a person, confined to a tiny space and isolated from others and from the sensations and temporalities of regular existence, to experience cognitive, psychological, proprioceptual, somatic, in sum, ontological breakdown? Guenther’s well-taken point is that if the human and her experiences...