Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

Notes

257 NOTES Introduction 1. See P. Smith 2006 for a detailed review of international studies on solitary confinement. 2. According to Craig Haney’s 2003 study of Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermax prison in California, 91 percent of prisoners in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) reported anxiety and nervousness; over 84 percent suffered from headaches , chronic fatigue, and difficulty sleeping; and 70 percent felt “on the verge of an emotional breakdown” (Haney 2003, 133). Similarly, ten of the fourteen prisoners interviewed by Stuart Grassian in his study of Walpole State Prison showed signs of “massive free-floating anxiety” (Grassian 1983, 1452), and all showed signs of what Grassian would later call “SHU syndrome”: hyperresponsivity to stimulus; perceptual distortions (including hallucinations); panic attacks; difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory; obsessional thoughts; paranoia; and problems with impulse control (Grassian 2006, 333–38). I will discuss this research in detail in chapters 6–9. 3. Seventy-five years later, Stephen Tillich, a Washington state supermax inmate , echoed this statement exactly: “It’s like being in a tomb” (quoted in Rhodes 2004, 113). 4. Shaylor comments, “The ‘blackness’ of the SHU is reflected in both its racialized nature and the darkness of the cells themselves; the degree of force within the SHU is experienced by the women through physical brutality and sexual violence ; the space of the SHU is oppressively small; mental stability is warped; the experience of passage of time is transformed; and communication flowing both into and out of the SHU is severely restricted” (1998, 415). 5. On mass incarceration and hyperincarceration in the United States, see Alexander 2010 and Wacquant 2001, respectively. 6. Wikipedia, s.v. Incarceration in the United States, accessed June 23, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States. 7. For example, in 1993, 98 percent of those held in the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, a supermax prison in Baltimore, were African American (J. G. Miller 1997, 227). 8. See Guenther 2012c for an explanation of my claim that Agamben fails to account adequately for ethical-political resistance. 9. See Alexander 2010, 153–56, 187–88. Rates of felon disenfranchisement are much higher for people of color than for whites. In California in 2009, African Americans were ten times more likely to be disenfranchised than whites. Hispanics make up 19 percent of California’s population, but 36.5 percent of its disenfranchised (Shalev 2009, 41). 10. Bryan v. Walton, 14 Georgia 185 (1853). 11. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). 12. Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. 790, 796 (1871). 13. Avery v. Everett, 110 N.Y. 317 (1888). 14. See Meillassoux 1991 for insightful reflections on natal alienation in the context of African slavery. See also Agamben 1998 on inclusive exclusion, 17–29. 15. See V. Brown 2009 for an elaboration of this point in resistance to Patterson’s concept of social death. 16. “Because the slave has no socially recognized existence outside of his master , he became a social nonperson” (Patterson 1982, 5). 17. Consider, for example, Frederick Douglass’s exposure to the torture of his Aunt Hester, Sethe’s inability to save her children from slavery except through infanticide in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Sojourner Truth’s forced reliance on the help of unreliable and unsympathetic white women to retrieve her son from being illegally sold to a slaveholder in another state (Douglass 1987, 343–44; Morrison 1998; Harris 1996, 325–28). 18. Arendt writes, “It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man. This is one of the reasons why it is far more difficult to destroy the legal personality of a criminal, that is of a man who has taken upon himself the responsibility for an act whose consequences now determine his fate, than of a man who has been disallowed all common human responsibilities” (Arendt 1973, 300). But I think that Arendt underestimates the degree to which the legal personality of criminals can be destroyed in a situation of mass incarceration, as well as the sense in which some prisoners are “state-raised,” interpellated as criminals more because of their class and race than because of their actions or speech. 19. “I have never accepted that I did this to myself. . . . That is the only reason I have been in prison this long” (Abbott 1991, 15). 20. Madrid v. Gomez, 889...