Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

by Lisa Guenther

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816686278
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	497 KB

About the Author

Lisa Guenther is associate professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. She facilitates a weekly discussion group at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement

I. The Early U.S. Penitentiary System
1. An Experiment in Living Death
2. Person, World, and Other: A Husserlian Critique of Solitary Confinement
3. The Racialization of Criminality and the Criminalization of Race: From the Plantation
to the Prison Farm

II. The Modern Penitentiary
4. From Thought Reform to Behavior Modification
5. Living Relationality: Merleau-Ponty’s Critical Phenomenological Account of Behavior
6. Beyond Dehumanization: A Posthumanist Critique of Intensive Confinement

III. Supermax Prisons
7. Supermax Confinement and the Exhaustion of Space
8. Dead Time: Heidegger, Levinas, and the Temporality of Supermax Confinement
9. From Accountability to Responsibility: A Levinasian Critique of Supermax Rhetoric

Conclusion: Afterlives

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

In an unusually vigorous interrogation of philosophy and the social sciences, Lisa Guenther addresses one of humanity’s greatest inhumanities and its perversely long, extensive history in America. Guenther offers a compelling critique of solitary confinement, in the course of which she pushes phenomenology beyond its classical limits, revealing our inherent inter-subjectivity, our need for both interaction and anonymity, and the moral imperative that America end this cruel and barbaric form of punishment. An urgently needed, powerfully argued study of one of the nation’s gravest moral and socio-political failings.
—Orlando Patterson, Harvard University

From the Publisher