What I'm Reading: Lisa Guenther, "Solitary Confinement"

CW: Torture

“There are many ways to destroy a person, but one of the simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement.”

WOW. 

As the title implies, this is a book about solitary confinement and what it does to people. Guenther argues that its effects are so profound and devastating that we actually need a new philosophical theory of mind to explain them. Early proponents of solitary assumed a view of human minds as separate from the world and each other - it’s the individualistic model of selves that still pervades widely today. But by engaging with the testimony of survivors, predominantly in the US, Guenther shows that they are so deeply traumatised and annihilated that they can lose the ability to interpret their own experiences. Prisoners often become anxious, depressed, psychotic, and suicidal, they can hallucinate, become incapable of understanding what is happening to them, and even fail to distinguish between themselves and others. If we truly were individual minds, she argues, we would not expect this to happen. Instead, Guenther draws on phenomenology to put forward a view of minds as inseparable from the world and each other: we actually need other people around not just to keep us happy, but to have meaningful experiences at all. The theory is fascinating, and all the more powerful because of the awful human cost so many have had to go through in order for it to come to light.

As well as philosophy of mind though, Guenther engages with the prison system itself and the history of solitary confinement, arguing that it’s a form of social death that grew out of many of the same logics as slavery: noting that contemporary criminality is highly racialised, she argues the practice doesn’t just dehumanise prisoners but actually deanimalises them, reducing them to the status of a natural resource. She traces a parallel history of torture from thumbscrews and the rack to the more sophisticated sonic torture used by the United States at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, making a convincing argument that solitary should be seen as the purest distillation of the principle of modern torture: turning the victim’s own capacity for experience against them. There’s also some brilliant engagement with the philosophy of human rights and how it can be turned against prisoners appealing the conditions in which they’re held. Moreover, she illustrates that the consequences of solitary confinement are incompatible with rehabilitation - you can’t rehabilitate people who have been rendered incapable of understanding their selves or their actions - which prompts a re-examination of the true purpose of prisons.

Some of the phenomenology sections are quite difficult, and some bits are occasionally repeated, but those are pretty minor flaws compared to just how mind-blowing this book is. It’s challenging in all the best ways, it’s informative, and it’s badly needed. Modern philosophy at its absolute best.

This’ll be informing an upcoming episode of the show in a major way. If you’d like to get it, you can get a copy here:
UK:
USA: 

And if you’d like to get me something from my Amazon wishlist, you can!