Abstract
Many prisoners in solitary confinement experience symptoms such as anxiety, paranoia, insomnia, headaches, hallucinations and other perceptual distortions. While psychiatric accounts of the effects of supermax confinement are important, especially in a legal context, they are insufficient to account for the phenomenological and even ontological harm of solitary confinement. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of space in supermax confinement by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeal depth.
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Notes
- 1.
It is difficult to determine with any exactness how many prisoners are currently held in supermax confinement in the US, or even how many supermax prisons exist at the federal and state levels. See Tapley (2010) for a detailed analysis of the available data. The first supermax prison in the world was established in 1983 in Marion, Illinois, when the entire prison was locked down in response to the murder of two guards. The first purpose-built supermax was Florence ADX, which opened in Colorado in 1985. Supermax prisons have now been built in at least ten other countries: Canada , Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Australia . See Gomez (2006) for a historical and political account of the emergence of supermax prisons.
- 2.
See Reiter (2010) for a detailed discussion of these issues.
- 3.
The former warden of Marion Penitentiary, Ralph Arons, admitted that “[t]he purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large” (cited Shaylor 1998, p. 398). See James (2003, 2005) for writing by US political prisoners such as George Jackson, Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn Buck, Laura Whitehorn and Alan Berkman, all of whom have been held in maximum or supermax level prisons.
- 4.
- 5.
A supermax prisoner interviewed by Lorna Rhodes says: “I’ve got some people out there I know from the streets and I know they’re going to give me a hug. But I won’t be able to because it’s embedded in my mind that when people touch me it has a negative effect, you know, that every time somebody touches me it’s a cop” (Rhodes 2004, p. 34).
- 6.
Anthropologist Lorna Rhodes says of her own experience visiting a control unit: “Echoing in their hard-edged interior, their shouts are a blur of rage-saturated sound” (Rhodes 2004, p. 22). One of the prisoners interviewed by Rhodes says: “They put you in an environment where you can’t talk to anybody else, you can’t have any contact… unless you yell or scream… The only thing you hear is the keys jingling” (31).
- 7.
A supermax prisoner interviewed by Rhodes says: “Your lights are on all day… it really kind of dulls all your senses… It makes you numb. You get easily mad. You feel that everything they do is just to make you mad…” (Rhodes 2004, p. 30).
- 8.
Gomez writes: “The CU — and its more recent progeny, Special Housing Units (SHU) — collapsed the legal and physical space between life and politics — and between punishment and death” (Gomez 2006, p. 60). “Designed as a breathing coffin, the CU was/is a space of permanent living death” (61). See also Caleb Smith’s work on the early US penitentiary, which he described as “a ‘living tomb’ of servitude and degradation as well as the space of the citizen-subject’s dramatic reanimation. Its legal codes divested the convict of rights; its ritualized disciplinary practices stripped away his identity; it exposed him to arbitrary and discretionary violence at the hands of his keepers; it buried him alive in his solitary cell. But it also promised him a glorious return to citizenship and humanity. It mortified the body, but it also claimed to renovate the soul. Its ideal subject was one who, in the words of one great Philadelphia reformer [Benjamin Rush], ‘was dead and is alive’” (Smith 2009, p. 6).
- 9.
Shaylor comments: “[T]he “blackness” of the SHU is reflected in both its racialized nature and the darkness of the cells themselves; the degree of force within the SHU is experienced by the women through physical brutality and sexual violence; the space of the SHU is oppressively small; mental stability is warped; the experience of passage of time is transformed; and communication flowing both into and out of the SHU is severely restricted” (Shaylor 1998, p. 415).
- 10.
Denise Jones, an inmate at Valley State Prison for Women, argues: “They treat us like animals. No, you wouldn’t treat an animal the way they do us here. I am sure they don’t treat their dogs the way they treat us” (Shaylor 1998, pp. 395–396). Mark Medley, a maximum security inmate at Maryland State Prison argues that prisoners are moved into different cells as part of a managerial plan rather than for the sake of rehabilitation or even security: “It’s just that they have to liquidate their inventory as a matter of storage space” (Baxter et al. 2005, p. 215).
- 11.
The lifeworld is the social, cultural, and historical context which forms the (often unacknowledged) background in relation to which we form our individual beliefs. Like the natural attitude, the lifeworld requires clarification and critique; but we cannot transcend the lifeworld, nor should we assume that true knowledge consists in breaking with socially-inherited meanings to obtain a purely objective, ahistorical grasp of reality. Rather, the lifeworld is what grounds a meaningful experience of oneself, others, things, and events in a shared context where there are multiple perspectives, sometimes consonant and sometimes conflicting. Husserl describes the lifeworld as follows: “We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world; it is from there, by objects pregiven in consciousness, that we are affected; it is to this or that object that we pay attention, according to our interests; with them we deal actively in different ways; through our acts they are “thematic” objects” (Husserl 1970, p. 108).
- 12.
Abbott called himself a “state-raised convict” (Abbott 1991, pp. 3–22). The son of a Chinese prostitute and an Irish sailor, he had already spending time in juvenile detention at age 9, was sent to an industrial school at age 12, and was sentenced for up to 5 years at age 18 for cashing a check for insufficient funds. While in prison, he killed a fellow inmate in prison and received an indeterminate sentence of 3–20 years.
- 13.
I have explored several of these in Guenther (2013). It’s also important to note the limitation of phenomenology in accounting for social structures such as racism and poverty, which distribute the risk of incarceration and punitive isolation in radically unequal ways. While I agree with Husserl that a transcendental account of consciousness is necessary to account for the very possibility of meaningful experience, I strongly believe that this transcendental analysis must be supplemented by a critical practice of social scientific research.
- 14.
Of course, even the cogito needs to discover another absolute point beyond itself—the God of the Third Meditation—in order to secure a stable and reliable knowledge of the world. I discuss this point in relation to the ethical and epistemological issues raised by solitary confinement in Chapter 9 of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (Guenther 2013).
- 15.
See Rhodes (2004) on the neoliberal logic of choice in supermax prisons and the double bind produced for prisoners who have almost no control over their situation, and yet must bear full accountability for their actions.
- 16.
Self-mutilation is a common response to prolonged solitary confinement. One of the prisoners interviewed by Grassian in 1983 says: “I cut my wrists – cut myself many times when in isolation. Now, it seems crazy. But every time I did it, I wasn’t thinking – lost control – cut myself without knowing what I was doing” (Grassian 1983, p. 1453). Grassian comments on this impulse: “Many became grossly disorganized and psychotic, smearing themselves with feces, mumbling and screaming incoherently all day and night, some even descending to the horror of eating parts of their own bodies” (Grassian 2006, p. 351).
- 17.
See David Morris ’s discussion of pacing in The Sense of Space: “The lion does not first take the measure of its cage in objective units, and then, finding it small, pace its confines; its elliptical, perpetual stride already is the ‘measure’ of its environment, the ‘measure’ of an environment in which there is no striking distance, no safe remove; correlatively, the caged lion’s stride is the ‘measure’ of an animal warped by confinement” (Morris 2004, p. 20).
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Guenther, L. (2015). The Psychopathology of Space: A Phenomenological Critique of Solitary Confinement. In: Meacham, D. (eds) Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 120. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9870-9_14
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