Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard
practice in U.S. prisons--even though it consistently drives
healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and,
according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life
to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book,
Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary
confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today's
supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines
prisoners' sense of identity and their ability to understand the
world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating
a person for weeks, months, or years.
Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of
philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines
solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that
isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what
happens when that structure is abused--when prisoners are deprived
of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as
sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a
form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on
being.
A searing and unforgettable indictment, "Solitary Confinement"
reveals what the devastation wrought by the torture of solitary
confinement tells us about what it means to be human--and why
humanity is so often destroyed when we separate prisoners from all
other people.
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