Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474514525916 |
| Author | Sara M Benson |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, 2013, 368 pp. (including index): 9780816679591, $ 22.47 (pbk), $ 71.25 (cloth)
‘There are many ways to destroy a person’, writes Lisa Guenther, ‘but one of the
simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement’ (p. xi).
Her latest book, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, paints a
vivid and tortured picture of prisons within prisons, purposefully designed spaces
where the state uses strategies it knows will produce madness. The book appears
alongside and in the service of a complicated coalition of prisoners, activists,
scholars, and members of Congress demanding a reconsideration of the practice.
Guenther’s work challenges the violence of an institution that concentrates poor
people and people of color in the already violent institution of mass incarceration.
As the United States continues to design a carceral democracy with higher incar-
ceration rates than even the most authoritarian regimes, Guenther’s Solitary
Confinement is critically important in its timing and in its refusal to situate social
science as the answer to all of the prison’s problems.
The book sets out to demonstrate that forced periods of total solitude erode not
only the social andpsychological characteristicsthat make prisoners people, but also
the ‘most basic sense of identity’ that orders the sense of self and the world (p. xi).
Guenther’s phenomenological approach defines concrete personhood as ‘the whole
complex of interrelations withinand among a multileveled self, a concrete world, and
the other concrete egos who constitute this world’ (p. 29). As this complex is thrown
into crisis by recurrent visions of things unseen, it becomes possible and even likely
that ‘one’s own sense of personhood’ will ‘diminish or even collapse’ (p. 34).
Guenther argues that the solitary prison purposefully turns people into physically,
emotionally, cognitively, and socially deteriorated beings that are not allowed to live
even the most fundamental aspects of a life. As a result, she asks, ‘How must con-
crete personhood be structured in order to be diminished so radically by the pro-
longed deprivation of the bodily presence of other people?’ (p. 23).
While solitary confinement has burdened the prison since its earliest instances,
and generations of scholars have shown that prison custodians know fully the
madness of sensory deprivation, Guenther’s intervention is striking in its rearrange-
ment of the problem of prison solitude. She refuses the more conventional rehearsal
of the insanity of prisoners, and asks instead what the solitary prison’s double
condition of living death means for the very constitution of subjectivity:
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? (p. xii)
Drawing from phenomenology the ideas of selves in relation and lives in resistance,
Guenther’s contribution deepens theories of civil and social deaths to explore how
solitary confinement turns being-in-the-world back on itself, depriving conscious-
ness of a ‘diverse, open-ended perceptual experience of the world’ (p. xv).
616 Punishment & Society 16(5)
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