Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

Introduction: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement

xi INTRODUCTION A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life. —George Jackson, Soledad Brother There are many ways to destroy a person, but one of the simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human interaction, otherwise healthy prisoners become unhinged. They see things that do not exist, and they fail to see things that do. Their sense of their own bodies—even the fundamental capacity to feel pain and to distinguish their own pain from that of others—erodes to the point where they are no longer sure if they are being harmed or are harming themselves. Not only psychological or social identity but the most basic sense of identity is threatened by prolonged solitary confinement. As Jack Henry Abbott wrote in his memoir In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, “Solitary con- finement can alter the ontological makeup of a stone” (1991, 45). We have known this for almost as long as solitary confinement has been practiced. In the 1830s, just years after the establishment of Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829, reports were already beginning to emerge of a sharp increase in mental disorders among prisoners, including hallucinations, “dementia,” and “monomania” (Grassian 1983, 1450; P. Smith 2006, 457). While penal codes, theories of criminal justice, and psychological terminology have all changed over time, the symptoms of solitary confinement have remained strikingly consistent: anxiety, fatigue, confusion, paranoia, depression, hallucinations, headaches, and uncontrollable trembling (P. Smith 2006, 488). Similar symptoms xii introduction are reported in the United States, Canada, Denmark, Germany, and South Africa—wherever the psychological effects of solitary confinement have been studied.1 Not only are these symptoms historically and geographically consistent, but they are also experienced by an overwhelming proportion of those who have undergone solitary confinement .2 But despite numerous lawsuits and overwhelming evidence of its harm, solitary confinement continues to form a basic component of federal and state prison systems in the United States, especially in supermax penitentiaries, where all prisoners are kept in twenty-threehour -a-day lockdown with almost no human contact. Many prisoners describe their experience in solitary confinement as a form of living death. Harry Hawser, a poet and inmate at Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1840s, called his cell “a living tomb” (quoted in C. Smith 2009, 5).3 Angela Tucker, an African American woman held at California’s Valley State Prison for Women in the 1980s, said, “It’s like living in a black hole” (quoted in Shaylor 1998, 386).4 Jeremy Pinson, a prisoner at the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, said, “You feel as if the world has ended but you somehow survived” (quoted in Greene 2012). 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? In the context of this inquiry, “becoming unhinged” is not just a colloquial expression; rather, it is a precise phenomenological description of what happens when the articulated joints of our embodied, interrelational subjectivity are broken apart. Solitary confinement deprives prisoners of the bodily presence of others, forcing them to rely on the isolated resources of their own subjectivity, with the (perhaps surprising ) effect of eroding or undermining that subjectivity. The very possibility of being broken in this way suggests that we are not simply atomistic individuals but rather hinged subjects who can become unhinged when the concrete experience of other embodied subjects is denied for too long. Even if the people in one’s life are not particularly sympathetic or supportive, it becomes difficult to bear the weight of existence in isolation from others. In this sense, solitary confinement makes even solitude impossible; isolated from social life, even one’s sense of individuated personhood threatens to dissolve. As a woman introduction xiii who experienced pretrial solitary confinement in Denmark explained, “The person subjected to solitary confinement risks losing her self and disappearing into a non-existence” (quoted and translated in P. Smith 2006, 497). How could I lose myself by being...