Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

353 Pages·2013·2.196 MB·English

by  Lisa Guenther

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
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SOLITARY
CONFINEMENT
Social Death and Its Afterlives
LISA GUENTHER
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
A different version of chapter 2 was published as “Subjects without a World? An
Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement,” Human Studies 34, no. 3 (June 2011):
257–76; reproduced with kind permission from Springer Science + Business Media B.V.
A different version of chapter 6 was published as “Beyond Dehumanization: A Post-
Humanist Critique of Intensive Confinement,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10,
no. 2 (2012): 46–68.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Guenther, Lisa, 1971–
Solitary confinement : social death and its afterlives / Lisa Guenther.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7958-4 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7959-1 (pb)
1. Solitary confinement—United States—History. 2. Solitary confinement—
History. I. Title.
HV9471.G84 2013
365'.644—dc23 2013014540
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For REACH Coalition, in solidarity
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CONTENTS
acknowledgments ix
introduction
ACritical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement xi
I. The Early U.S. Penitentiary System
1 An Experiment in Living Death 3
2 Person, World, and Other: A Husserlian
Critique of Solitary Confinement 23
3 The Racialization of Criminality and the
Criminalization of Race: From the Plantation
to the Prison Farm 39
II. The Modern Penitentiary
4 From Thought Reform to Behavior Modification 65
5 Living Relationality: Merleau-Ponty’s Critical
Phenomenological Account of Behavior 101
6 Beyond Dehumanization: A Posthumanist
Critique of Intensive Confinement 125
III. Supermax Prisons
7 Supermax Confinement and the
Exhaustion of Space 161
8 Dead Time: Heidegger, Levinas, and the
Temporality of Supermax Confinement 195
9 F rom Accountability to Responsibility:
A Levinasian Critique of Supermax Rhetoric 221
conclusion
Afterlives 253
notes 257
bibliography 295
index 315
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been written if not for Angela Davis. In my
first year teaching at Vanderbilt University, I audited a graduate course
on slavery with Dr. Davis, who was a visiting professor in the philoso-
phy department at the time. This course, along with her written work
on slavery, prisons, and torture, changed the course of my research and
my life. I thank her.
I am also grateful to many friends, colleagues, and students for en-
gaging in what must seem like endless conversations, projects, con-
ference papers, blog posts, and even Facebook updates about prisons.
My most steadfast interlocutors are the past and present members
of REACH Coalition, who meet on Wednesday nights in Unit 2 of
Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to discuss philosophy and
to build community: Abu Ali Abdur’Rahman, Geoffrey Adelsberg,
Devin Banks, Kevin Burns, Ron Cauthern, Natalie Cisneros, Gary
Cone, David Duncan, Joshua Hall, Kennath Henderson, Carmela
Hill-Burke, Olen Hutchison, Akil Jahi, Don Johnson, Katie Kelly,
Donald Middlebrooks, Harold Wayne Nichols, Richard Odom, Pervis
Payne, Andrea Pitts, Derrick Quintero, Donika Ross, Sandy Skene,
Rebecca Tuvel, Sarah Tyson, and Scott Zeman. Many thanks to
Donald Middlebrooks for his painting Midnight, which appears on the
cover of this book. Thank you to Janet Wolf and Jeannie Alexander for
making this group possible and for providing guidance when I needed
it most. It has been an honor and an inspiration to correspond with
Russell Maroon Shoats, who has been held in solitary confinement for
thirty years at State Correctional Institution Greene and other prisons.
At Vanderbilt, Kelly Oliver, David Wood, Jose Medina, Idit Dobbs-
Weinstein, Rob Talisse, Colin Dayan, and Ellen Armor have been
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